The time traveler's wife (7 page)

"That's okay, it's almost dark. Is it a
school night?"

"Uh-huh." "What's the
date?"

"Thursday, September 29,1977."
"That's very helpful. Thanks." "How come you don't know
that?"

"Well, I just got here. A few minutes ago
it was Monday, March 27, 2000. It was a rainy morning and I was making
toast."

"But you wrote it down for me." She
takes out a piece of Philip's law office letterhead and holds it out for me. I
walk to her and take it, and am interested to see the date written on it in my
careful block lettering. I pause and grope for the best way to explain the
vagaries of time travel to the small child who is Clare at the moment.

"It's like this. You know how to use a
tape recorder?"

"Mmhmm."

"Okay. So you put in a tape and you play
it from the beginning to the end, right?"

"Yeah
"

"That's how your life is. You get up in
the morning and you eat breakfast and you brush your teeth and you go to
school, right? You don't get up and suddenly find yourself at school eating
lunch with Helen and Ruth and then all of a sudden you're at home getting
dressed, right?"

Clare giggles. "Right."

"Now for me, it's different. Because I am
a time traveler, I jump around a lot from one time to another. So it's like if
you started the tape and played it for a while but then you said Oh I want to
hear that song again, so you played that song and then you went back to where
you left off but you wound the tape too far ahead so you rewound it again but
you still got it too far ahead. You see?"

"Sort of."

"Well, it's not the greatest analogy in
the world. Basically, sometimes I get lost in time and I don't know when I
am." " What's analogy?"

"It's when you try to explain something by
saying it's like another thing. For example, at the moment I am as snug as a
bug in a rug in this nice sweater, and you are as pretty as a picture, and Etta
is going to be as mad as a hatter if you don't go in pretty soon."

"Are you going to sleep here? You could
come to our house, we have a guest room." "Gosh, that's very nice of
you. Unfortunately, I am not allowed to meet your family until 1991."

Clare is utterly perplexed. I think part of the
problem is that she can't imagine dates beyond the 70s. I remember having the
same problem with the '60s when I was her age. "Why not?"

"It's part of the rules. People who time
travel aren't supposed to go around talking to regular people while they visit
their times, because we might mess things up." Actually, I don't believe
this; things happen the way they happened, once and only once. I'm not a
proponent of splitting universes.

"But you talk to me."

"You're special. You're brave and smart
and good at keeping secrets." Clare is embarrassed. "I told Ruth, but
she didn't believe me."

"Oh. Well, don't worry about it. Very few
people ever believe me, either. Especially doctors. Doctors don't believe
anything unless you can prove it to them."

"I believe you."

Clare is standing about five feet away from me.
Her small pale face catches the last orange light from the west. Her hair is
pulled back tightly into a ponytail and she is wearing blue jeans and a dark
sweater with zebras running across the chest. Her hands are clenched and she
looks fierce and determined. Our daughter, I think sadly, would have looked
like this.

"Thank you, Clare." "I have to
go in now." "Good idea." "Are you coming back?"

I consult the List, from memory. "I'll be
back October 16. It's a Friday. Come here, right after school. Bring that
little blue diary Megan gave you for your birthday and a blue ballpoint
pen" I repeat the date, looking at Clare to make sure she is remembering.

"Au revoir, Clare."

"Aurevoir
       
"

"Henry."

" Au revoir, Henri." Already her
accent is better than mine. Clare turns and runs up the path, into the arms of
her lighted and welcoming house, and I turn to the dark and begin to walk
across the meadow. Later in the evening I chuck the tie in the dumpster behind
Dina's Fish 'n Fry.

LESSONS IN SURVIVAL

Thursday, June 7, 1973 (Henry is 27, and 9)

Henry: I am standing across the street from the
Art Institute of Chicago on a sunny June day in 1973 in the company of my nine-year-old
self. He is traveling from next Wednesday; I have come from 1990. We have a
long afternoon and evening to frivol as we will, and so we have come to one of
the great art museums of the world for a little lesson in pick-pocketing.

"Can't we just look at the art?"
pleads Henry. He's nervous. He's never done this before. "Nope. You need
to know this. How are you going to survive if you can't steal anything?"
"Begging."

"Begging is a drag, and you keep getting
carted off by the police. Now, listen: when we get in there, I want you to stay
away from me and pretend we don't know each other. But be close enough to watch
what I'm doing. If I hand you anything, don't drop it, and put it in your
pocket as fast as you can. Okay?"

"I guess. Can we go see St. George?"

"Sure." We cross Michigan Avenue and
walk between students and housewives sunning themselves on the museum steps.
Henry pats one of the bronze lions as we go by. I feel moderately bad about
this whole thing. On the one hand, I am providing myself with urgently required
survival skills. Other lessons in this series include Shoplifting, Beating
People Up, Picking Locks, Climbing Trees, Driving, Housebreaking, Dumpster
Diving, and How to Use Oddball Things like Venetian Blinds and Garbage Can Lids
as Weapons. On the other hand, I'm corrupting my poor innocent little self. I
sigh. Somebody's got to do it. It's Free Day, so the place is swarming with
people. We stand in line, move through the entry, and slowly climb the
grandiose central staircase. We enter the European Galleries and make our way
backward from the seventeenth-century Netherlands to fifteenth-century Spain.
St. George stands poised, as always, ready to transfix his dragon with his
delicate spear while the pink and green princess waits demurely in the
middleground. My self and I love the yellow-bellied dragon wholeheartedly, and
we are always relieved to find that his moment of doom has still not arrived.
Henry and I stand before Bernardo Martorell's painting for five minutes, and
then he turns to me. We have the gallery to ourselves at the moment.

"It's not so hard," I say. "Pay
attention. Look for someone who is distracted. Figure out where the wallet is.
Most men use either their back pocket or the inside pocket of their suit
jacket. With women you want the purse behind their back. If you're on the
street you can just grab the whole purse, but then you have to be sure you can
outrun anybody who might decide to chase you. It's much quieter if you can take
it without them noticing."

"I saw a movie where they practiced with a
suit of clothes with little bells and if the guy moved the suit while he took
the wallet the bells rang."

"Yeah, I remember that movie. You can try
that at home. Now follow me." I lead Henry from the fifteenth century to
the nineteenth; we arrive suddenly in the midst of French Impressionism. The
Art Institute is famous for its Impressionist collection. I can take it or
leave it, but as usual these rooms are jam-packed with people craning for a
glimpse of La Grande Jatte or a Monet Haystack. Henry can't see over the heads
of the adults, so the paintings are lost on him, but he's too nervous to look
at them anyway. I scan the room. A woman is bending over her toddler as it
twists and screams. Must be nap time. I nod at Henry and move toward her. Her
purse has a simple clasp and is slung over her shoulder, across her back. She's
totally focused on getting her child to stop screeching. She's in front of
Toulouse-Lautrec's At the Moulin Rouge. I pretend to be looking at it as I walk,
bump into her, sending her pitching forward, I catch her arm, "I'm so
sorry, forgive me, I wasn't looking, are you all right? It's so crowded in here
 
" My hand is in her purse, she's
flustered, she has dark eyes and long hair, large breasts, she's still trying
to lose the weight she gained having the kid. I catch her eye as I find her
wallet, still apologizing, the wallet goes up my jacket sleeve, I look her up
and down and smile, back away, turn, walk, look over my shoulder. She has
picked up her boy and is staring back at me, slightly forlorn. I smile and
walk, walk. Henry is following me as I take the stairs down to the Junior
Museum. We rendezvous by the men's toilets.

"That was weird," says Henry.
"Why'd she look at you like that?"

"She's lonely," I euphemize.
"Maybe her husband isn't around very much." We cram ourselves into a
stall and I open her wallet. Her name is Denise Radke. She lives in Villa Park,
Illinois. She is a member of the museum and an alumna of Roosevelt University.
She is carrying twenty-two dollars in cash, plus change. I show all this to
Henry, silently, put the wallet back as it was, and hand it to him. We walk out
of the stall, out of the men's room, back toward the entrance to the museum.
"Give this to the guard. Say you found it on the floor."

"Why?"

"We don't need it; I was just
demonstrating." Henry runs to the guard, an elderly black woman who smiles
and gives Henry a sort of half-hug. He conies back slowly, and we walk ten feet
apart, with me leading, down the long dark corridor which will someday house
Decorative Arts and lead to the as-yet-unthought-of Rice Wing, but which at the
moment is full of posters. I'm looking for easy marks, and just ahead of me is
a perfect illustration of the pickpocket's dream. Short, portly, sun burnt, he
looks as though he's made a wrong turn from Wrigley Field in his baseball cap
and polyester trousers with light blue short-sleeved button-down shirt. He's
lecturing his mousy girlfriend on Vincent van Gogh.

"So he cuts his ear off and gives it to
his girl—hey, how'd you like that for a present, huh? An ear! Huh. So they put
him in the loony bin..."

I have no qualms about this one. He strolls on,
braying, blissfully unaware, with his wallet in his left back pocket. He has a
large gut but almost no backside, and his wallet is pretty much aching for me
to take it. I amble along behind them. Henry has a clear view as I deftly
insert my thumb and forefinger into the mark's pocket and liberate the wallet.
I drop back, they walk on, I pass the wallet to Henry and he shoves it into his
pants as I walk ahead. I show Henry some other techniques: how to take a wallet
from the inside breast pocket of a suit, how to shield your hand from view
while it's inside a woman's purse, six different ways to distract someone while
you take their wallet, how to take a wallet out of a backpack, and how to get
someone to inadvertently show you where their money is. He's more relaxed now,
he's even starting to enjoy this. Finally, I say, "Okay, now you
try."

He's instantly petrified. "I can't."

"Sure you can. Look around. Find
someone." We are standing in the Japanese Print Room. It's full of old
ladies. "Not here." "Okay, where?"

He thinks for a minute. "The
restaurant?"

We walk quietly to the restaurant. I remember
this all vividly. I was totally terrified. I look over at my self and sure
enough, his face is white with fear. I'm smiling, because I know what comes
next. We stand at the end of the line for the garden restaurant. Henry looks
around, thinking. In front of us in line is a very tall middle-aged man wearing
a beautifully cut brown lightweight suit; it's impossible to see where the
wallet is. Henry approaches him, with one of the wallets I've lifted earlier
proffered on his outstretched hand.

"Sir? Is this yours?" says Henry
softly. "It was on the floor."

"Uh? Oh, hmm, no," the man checks his
right back pants pocket, finds his wallet safe, leans over Henry to hear him
better, takes the wallet from Henry and opens it. "Hmm, my, you should
take this to the security guards, hmm, there's quite a bit of cash in here,
yes," the man wears thick glasses and peers at Henry through them as he
speaks and Henry reaches around under the man's jacket and steals his wallet.
Since Henry is wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt I walk behind him and he passes
the wallet to me. The tall thin brown-suited man points at the stairs,
explaining to Henry how to turn in the wallet. Henry toddles off in the
direction the man has indicated, and I follow, overtake Henry and lead him
right through the museum to the entrance and out, past the guards, onto
Michigan Avenue and south, until we end up, grinning like fiends, at the
Artists Cafe, where we treat ourselves to milkshakes and french fries with some
of our ill-gotten gains. Afterwards we throw all the wallets in a mailbox, sans
cash, and I get us a room at the Palmer House.

"So?" I ask, sitting on the side of
the bathtub watching Henry brush his teeth.

" ot?" returns Henry with a mouth
full of toothpaste.

"What do you think?"

He spits. "About what?"

"Pick-pocketing."