The Folded Clock (17 page)

Today my friends and I swam the entire length of the harbor, and out into the Reach, and around the point, and to the beach where my friends are staying. As we swam past the docks, we chatted with the people on them. “George,” we said, as we neared the first dock. “When's your daughter arriving?” George replied, “Late tomorrow night. Would you like to take a rest here? Can I get you a drink?” We demurred. We had places to be! People to visit! As we stroked past I thought I saw George growing older and older. His grandchildren beside him grew older, too, taking his place before being replaced themselves by
their
children. It was like a trick of stop-time photography, everyone shading into everyone else. (It helped that I didn't have my glasses on, and that the members of George's family are tall and thin and slightly stooped, even the young. At a squint, they blend.) Near the yacht club dock we exchanged pleasantries with the commodore. “Where are you going?” he asked. “Out into the Reach!” we said. We swam and we swam. We waved to people on boats and deflected, with good cheer, their slightly concerned disbelief regarding our swimming project. Eventually, we reached our destination, and all of us were blue, and all of us concurred, “That might have been a little shorter, that swim.” We lay on the hot rocks. We each drank a beer. Time passed. Time passed. I started to doze. The cold water had slowed our pulses but everything else spun at great speed. I worried I would awake to find myself an old woman, my husband dead, my daughter grown and turned into me. But life, when I woke up, was as I'd left it.

Today I had a dinner party. I did not tell the people I'd invited who else was coming. I didn't want anyone to pre-Google anyone. I don't know why I wanted to control what my friends did or did not know before they arrived to my house. I do know that I treat the Internet as an oracle that one consults, like Laius, father of Oedipus, at his peril. Must I know my son will grow up to kill me? Or that my Amazon star ranking is on the wane? For this reason I limit my visits. I don't ask questions I feel I cannot handle the answers to.

I feel others should exercise similar caution.

A few years ago, when my son was in day care, I met the father of one of his playmates. I did not know at the time, but I would soon learn via parental gossip, that the man's wife had died when his daughter was two months old. “Gossip” is maybe the wrong word to describe how I came to know his history. No malice was intended. The chatter was in the service of protection. It prevented the unwitting from asking the father, “Do you and your wife live around here?” or asking the little girl, “Is your mother picking you up today?”

The gossip gave rise to further curiosity and speculation on my part, especially since I'd become somewhat acquainted with the man. I so badly wanted to know how his wife had died. Had she committed suicide? Had she been killed in a car accident? The man is an actor and his wife was a director of documentary films; they were, in other words, slightly more Googleable than other people. But Googling him seemed invasive; also, to learn the
details about his wife would put me in the position, when he eventually told me these details, of pretending I didn't already know them. Unlike him, I am no actor.

I did not Google him. After a few more weeks of walking together and spending time in playgrounds, during which time he still hadn't told me about his wife, I considered that he possibly
hoped
I'd look him up online (as my friend having the affair with her married coworker had possibly hoped I'd look up her lover's identity online), as this would remove the burden of his having to tell me. He'd let the Internet do the disclosing for him.

I still did not Google him. My loyalty paid off. Finally, six months into knowing him, he told me what had happened to his wife. We were at a party. The ambient noise was such, however, that I couldn't hear him. What he was telling me was no doubt extremely heartrending, and so it seemed rude to say, repeatedly, “Sorry,
what
?” I pretended, for politeness' sake, to understand. I expressed regret and sadness and said, repeatedly, “Wow,” and, “Oh my God.” Then I went home and Googled him.

The Googling that might occur before dinner parties, however, confuses me more than the Googling of dead wives, especially since I prefer to have dinner parties where nobody talks about their careers. Isn't that the mark of a failed dinner party? When the conversations resemble job interviews? Wouldn't it actually be preferable, thus, to request that everyone Google the other guests beforehand so our tedious biographies won't need teasing out in person?

At my dinner party, however, I quite purposefully prevented any pre-Googling. To this dinner I'd invited a couple I didn't know very well along with some close friends, one of whom is a well-known writer. I didn't tell the new couple
that this writer would be at the dinner. I thought I was omitting this fact as a means of showing how unimpressed I was by literary celebrity. I'm so unimpressed that when the new couple arrived to the party, I didn't disclose his identity, not even when I introduced him. (I said, “This is my neighbor.”) To state his name, or so my thinking went, might be seen as name-dropping; there is little else in the world that I hate more. I went so far out of my way not to name-drop that I accomplished something even more pretentious. I also told myself that I was doing the new couple a favor. Fame basically prohibits casual conversation. What's your opening gambit with George Clooney? It's all so fucking awkward.

I also viewed my act of nondisclosure as an experiment. I wanted to see how many minutes or hours would pass before the new couple figured out who this writer was. What if they never did? What a great party that would be if we all just made jokes and shared no personal information, not even our names.

Predictably, there was much awkwardness. A lot of confused small talk eventually led to the writer's occupation and then his identity being revealed. By the end of the night, it was still unclear whether I'd done the couple a favor or a disservice. It was unclear whether they left that evening thinking that I was merely an eccentric hostess or a deeply messed-up person.

Today my husband and I watched the finale of
The Bachelorette
, Season Eight. The bachelorette, Emily, is a
bright yellow blonde with fake boobs and a polite, little-girl demeanor. She has a daughter by her former fiancé, a racecar driver who died in a plane crash. (Her story, and maybe it checks out, and maybe it doesn't, and I don't care either way, is that she discovered she was pregnant a week after her fiancé was killed.)

We've known Emily, my husband and I, for two full seasons. We first met her on
The Bachelor
, Season Fifteen; she competed with seventeen other girls for the heart of Brad, such as it was. Even though she was chilly, and unforthcoming, and appeared to be one of those pretty women who'd never once had to make an effort in bed, and thus hadn't, she won Brad's heart. She took it home, she found it small and defective. Wisely, Emily ditched it.

Though she frequently demurred that the constant tabloid attention wasn't for her, she returned to TV a year later as the star of her own show.

Initially, we were disappointed in The Franchise's choice. Emily was pretty and likable, but she wasn't smart enough to be interesting or dim enough to be an accidental genius. We feared that she would sit around in a sparkly dress and let men fawn over her, even the asshole-ish and the ill-intentioned. This would be the dramatic highlight, we figured, her failing to understand that some men, just because they liked her, aren't good people.

But Emily surprised us. She proved to be a much tarter apple. She had wit and sharp retorts, she gave men shit as a way of flirting with them (and some men were so thick they neither understood that she was giving them shit nor that she was flirting with them), and she totally knew who the scumbags were.

Tonight, on the final episode of her season, Emily had to choose between Jef, a boyish entrepreneur whose family
owned a gazillion-acre ranch in Utah, and Arie, a handsome racecar driver. The obvious choice was Arie because Emily wanted to fuck Arie, and historically the bachelors and the bachelorettes choose to marry the people they most wanted to fuck, even if that person is despicable.

Emily, meanwhile, had zero chemistry with Jef—they bird-pecked when they kissed; they had nothing to say to each other—but she
wanted
to want Jef. Her desire marked her either as a climber and a gold digger, or as an ambitious woman who privileges over sex and love not money per se (though Jef was certainly rich, and also a Mormon whose mysterious socioeconomic situation—the big house, the many children and women
—The Bachelorette
found it wise to represent in general yet in its specifics ignore), but exposure to new experiences. Arie's career as a racecar driver meant he'd be traveling much of the time; in effect, she'd still be a single mother. Also, as noted, her dead fiancé, the father of her daughter, was a racecar driver. While dating him, she'd hosted her own cable show about car racing. I imagined her thinking about Arie and the future he offered her:
done that
. She wanted to try something new. Emily is a beautiful enough and smart enough woman who can have any man she chooses, and also, via these men, any life she chooses. She chose a life over a man. She chose Jef. (Cue my grad school friend,
women expect a world
.) Wasn't this so ambitious of her? Wasn't this savvy and self-knowing?

Recently I went hiking with a woman whose daughter is friends with my daughter. This woman is beautiful but haplessly so. She cannot dress herself; she has no clue about hair. She told me about an old woman, a famous heiress, that she'd worked for when she was in her twenties. The old heiress advised her to use her looks to get
ahead while she still had them. She told her there was no shame in doing this, and that she, the heiress, was bored by women who thought they should handicap their best assets on the principle that doing so would be unfair, or that the spoils they achieved would be less valuable.

My friend said, “I had no idea how to do what she was talking about. I had no idea how to use my looks to get anywhere.” This might sound insincere; it isn't. She really doesn't know how. Funnily, her daughter, who is eight, already knows how to use her looks as the heiress recommended her mother do. The mother could take lessons from her eight-year-old daughter. So who can say where this knowledge comes from?

I have the knowledge, but to what degree I put this knowledge to use is debatable (i.e., I have a debate about it with myself). My parents like to tell of the time I came home from high school and announced that I wanted to dye my blonde hair black so that people would take my mind, my brilliant teenaged mind, more seriously. My desire was hollow. Or rather my desire was other than it seemed. I
desired
to be a teenaged girl who could destroy her most compelling teen asset. But I was never her.