The Folded Clock (16 page)

Today I went to the doctor for a physical. I took tests to discover if I had diseases I am certain I do not have. Like AIDS. Even during the '80s, I never, save one time, worried that I'd contracted it, even though my friends had regular freak-outs and disappeared to the health services clinic to have their blood drawn after long nights of death-worry. In part I was not worried about becoming sick and dying because I never worried about becoming sick and dying. Hypochondria, until my recent health scare, was not a tempting velodrome for my neuroses.

But primarily I never worried about getting AIDS because I slept with extremely straight straight people. None of them used needles. None of them had been in moped accidents in Kenya, and so none of them had
received sketchy blood transfusions in huts. I cavorted, or so I believed, with a low-risk crowd.

Thus, in my nearly thirty years of sexual activity, I've had only one long night of AIDS worry. This night was spent at LaGuardia Airport in New York. It was summer. I was trying to get back to New Hampshire, where I and fifteen other people slept on floor mattresses in a house hanging over a river. I'd been in Oregon visiting my boyfriend, who'd been living in South America for the year. He'd returned to see his family for a week, and we reconnected in his hometown like the devoted couple we were, though unbeknownst to him I'd been having sex with another guy. My boyfriend and I didn't have an open relationship, but I considered the vast distance (time zones and miles) between us as license to sleep with someone else temporarily, especially since I planned eventually to move to South America to join him. Especially since I planned eventually to marry him. I was totally committed to him while sleeping with another guy. This made sense to me then. It makes sense to me now.

Moreover I didn't love this other guy. He was more like a conquest. A class or maybe a social clique conquest. He was from Greenwich. His girlfriend prior to me—she'd grown up in Manhattan—had been dating “the Preppie Killer” Robert Chambers when he accidentally-or-not strangled Jennifer Levin in Central Park during a bout of rough sex. I continued to sleep with this guy I didn't love because he made me feel I was part of a world I desperately wished, at that time, to be part of. If it took sleeping with a man who slept with a woman who slept with a murderer, so be it. Now I was only three fucks away from Robert Chambers. Now I was practically at Dorrian's Red Hand, the Upper East Side bar that had served alcohol to underage
prep schoolers the night Chambers and Levin hooked up. I had practically seen them leave the bar together. I had practically turned to my best friend, whose family owned a private plane and a captain's house on Nantucket, and said,
Something terrible is about to happen!
(Even when I fantasized about being on the scene that night at Dorrian's Red Hand, I was still little better than an outsider; i.e., if I managed to have any value at all in that world, it would have been as a spooky, future-predicting witch.)

So I was at LaGuardia. I had just left my boyfriend in Oregon and was returning to my not-boyfriend in New Hampshire. The heavens protested. They heaved a lot of lightning around. My flight was canceled. This tart would be spending the night in the airport, forced to confront her deceitful ways until dawn.

The best way to pass an overnight in an airport is with a junky book. I'd buy a mystery before the newsstand closed. That was my plan, but then I saw a copy of
Wasted: The Preppie Murder
by Linda Wolfe, the true crime account of Robert Chambers and Jennifer Levin. I'd heard about this book. I'd been dying to read this book. (Published in 1989, it has a goodreads ranking. One woman gave it three stars and wrote, “Very interesting true story but the ending is a letdown.”)

I bought it. I started reading. I thought I knew everything about Robert Chambers, but it turned out I didn't. He'd been a drug addict and needle user. He'd been possibly bisexual in New York City in the '80s. Had I known these things I might have practiced safe sex for once in my life. My three-fucks-away-from-Robert-Chambers status initiated a long night of death worry. I could have AIDS! Heritage AIDS! I decided I couldn't stay in the airport, or I'd drive myself crazy, reading
Wasted: The Preppie Murder
by the half-light of the closed concessions, anxiously obsessing about my death, and also the death of my boyfriend (whom I would have basically killed with my dishonesty), and how, if my boyfriend didn't break up with me for cheating on him and giving him AIDS, we'd have to forgo living in South America and instead spend our final days at an experimental treatment facility in Mexico, where we could still get married, and after our wedding, I would ideally die first, because I had, as a kid, read
Love Story
by Erich Segal upward of fifty-nine times, and I wanted my husband/boyfriend to be able to say at my funeral, “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?” and (even though I had given him AIDS), “Love means never having to say you're sorry.”

I made calls from a payphone using a credit card I'd failed to make any payments on for months, but which, by some glitch, worked. It was a Saturday night, but I found some friends at home. I took a cab to their apartment. We went to an Irish bar and got drunk. I slept on their couch. By the next morning, I was cured of my worry. I continued to sleep with the three-fucks-away guy for the rest of the summer and fall. This didn't make sense to me then. It doesn't make sense to me now. Despite what I learned in the airport, I didn't get tested for AIDS for another three years. When I did, I was not positive.

Today I realized that I am not in a bad mood. I am something else. I am someone else. This happens to me as it happens to everyone. You are not you for months at a
time. When you become you again, you can actually greet yourself. You can welcome yourself back.

In my mind my life was ending in small and big ways. I wasn't despondent over these endings; instead I was energized by them. Because of the joke I made about three-way sex in class yesterday, I was going to lose my job, and so I must start thinking of a new career. Because I am not myself, my husband would leave me in search of a woman who more closely resembled the one he married. Because my babysitter and I parted on strange terms, and because she still has the house keys, she was going to enter the apartment at night and kill our children as we slept, so I needed to protect them. When I told my husband why I was sleeping with our children and not with him, I expected him to understand my reasoning and appreciate my prudence. Because he is an incredible human, he did.

What is interesting about these alternate states of being, however, is that they never seem crazy once exited and viewed from a more sober location. Even when I return from wherever I've been, I understand why, when not myself, I do what I do and believe what I believe. I consider myself highly sane and competent for exhuming the possibility that my children might be killed from the lulling blandness of everyday life. I congratulate myself for my foresight. I think:
I want
that
person on my team
. She has all the angles covered. In her brain she runs a computer program to evade dooms no one has even considered. There's nothing she hasn't thought of, and thought of and thought of, poor woman.

Today I was seated at a dinner beside the sister-in-law of a friend. We talked about self-destructive New Age healers and whether or not old Hasidic men in Brooklyn speak to you only if they think you're a Polish prostitute, and she showed me pictures of her dog before she showed me pictures of her baby. Then we discussed the bath salts epidemic in Maine. My husband and I first learned about the bath salts epidemic through a local newspaper we'd purchased for the purpose of starting a fire in our woodstove. My husband held up a front page with a photograph of a distraught woman and the headline, “Husband Hasn't Been the Same Since He Started Doing Them.” “Guess what he's been doing?” my husband asked. I guessed coffee liqueur. I guessed Sudoku. “Bath salts,” he said. Bath salts? We imagined a man lying in a tub filled with scented water, unable to get out. Within a week he'd have lost his job, and his wife would be despairing. She'd cry at the foot of the tub in which he floated, serenely pink, as the house was repossessed and the children taken by social services.

The article did nothing to correct this assumption of ours. (We eventually learned that bath salts are typically snorted, that the high is a cross between meth and acid, that they can inspire people to eat the faces off of other people.) For days we believed that poverty-stricken people in Maine would get into a warm bath one day and never get out. Did this seem so implausible? It didn't to me. Bath salts are a dangerous temptation in our household. My husband and I take turns before dinner disappearing into a salted bath. There is never a compelling reason to get out,
not for the first forty-five minutes at least, until the water starts to cool and you're vaguely reminded that you like the life you've built with your spouse, at which point you consider the possibility that it
might
be worth leaving the tub in order to maintain it. But if your life sucks and you hate your spouse? Yes, I can see a bathtub being a perfect place never to leave.

So this woman and I talked about the local bath salts epidemic. I didn't know anyone who did them, but I'd once given a ride to a woman who'd been on them, I told her. She wanted to know the story of this woman. It was late at night, I said. My husband and I were returning from a dinner party and realized we were out of gas. We stopped at the automated pumps where there is always classic rock playing, where the lighting is always blue and bright, where it is always like an underage nightclub. On this night the pumps were playing Fleetwood Mac. I noticed another car parked just outside the illuminated area. One back door was open. The car appeared to have been abandoned, until, when I looked up again, I saw a lone woman zombie-shuffling toward the pump island.

“Help me,”
she said. She spoke from beyond the grave.
“Help me.”

I asked: How could we help her?

“Help me
,” she said.

My husband and I exchanged a confused look.

“Can we call anyone to help you?” he said.

This time she heard us. She freaked out. Her face spasmed.

“My dad will kill me if he finds out,” she said. “He will fucking
kill me
.”

(I told the woman with whom I was having dinner: “Mind you, this woman was easily forty years old.”)

We asked the woman where she lived, she answered vaguely, we calculated based on these vague descriptions that her house wasn't too far out of our way. We offered her a ride, even though my husband worried, given the woman's tenuous grip on her surroundings, that she'd never be able to locate her own driveway, and that we'd be carting her around all night.

I drove. My husband sat in the back because he hates making small talk with strangers on street drugs with whom he is, by the laws of vehicular proximity, obliged to chat. We also figured he could restrain her from behind if she went nuts. We'd already shared a knowing glance
—bath salts, clearly
. Given we had no experience with the bath salt high, we thought we should be prepared for anything.

Once we were driving, her brain notched into a manic groove. “You have no idea what happened to me tonight. You have no idea. You have no idea what happened to me tonight.” This refrain persisted for seven miles. She'd grabbed my husband's hand over the back of her seat; she violently caressed it. “Shit Louie,” she said. “That's what people say down south. Shit Louie. Shit Louie. Shit Louie. You have no idea what happened to me tonight.”

At this point I wanted an idea. The reason I'd agreed to give this woman a ride was, yes, because she was in a bind, but the repayment for my generosity should be her story. What happened tonight? I half suspected there'd been a dead body in her car. She'd killed her boyfriend, maybe, for refusing to drive her home.

As we neared the town where she lived, her energy changed. She grew distracted. Her scatty brain got ideas it couldn't articulate. She held her purse in her lap; she slid one hand inside of it. I sensed an impulsive act brewing. For the first time, I got scared. She was going to pull a
gun—the gun with which she'd killed her boyfriend—and now she was going to kill me, or my husband, or herself. No target would prove compelling until, in a random millisecond, it became unbearably compelling. She started repeating, menacingly, “I owe you big-time. I owe you big-time. Shit Louie, I am going to give you
the best present ever
.”

The ride ended uneventfully. She located her driveway. She lived in a trailer, a nice one. She hopped out of the car and suddenly seemed as harmless as a drunk teenager relieved to be home. “I am going to give you the best present tomorrow!” she said again, forgetting she had no idea who we were or where we lived.

I concluded by saying to my dinner partner, “And for sure the woman was on bath salts!” I felt a little bit guilty having wasted so much time telling her this story. It starts promisingly, but the end tells nothing. “Very interesting true story but the ending is a letdown.” I hadn't turned the deflation of events into a moment of unexpected revelation. I could see the woman trying to apply the right kind of curiosity, because I hadn't properly directed it. Her curiosity passed over the bath salts woman and landed on me.

“I can't believe you gave her a ride,” she said. “That says a lot about you as a person.” I thought she was going to compliment me on my selflessness, and I would then counter with the usual demurrals.
She was so desperate! Anyone would have done what I did!

“Either you're stupid,” she said, “or you're just really nosy.”