The Folded Clock (24 page)

Today we had a dinner party at our small German house. We live up by the gate in what was once the gardener's shed. The house is so snug that my work desk is in the kitchen which is also basically our bedroom. While people ate cheese and drank beer, they examined the books on my desk. “This is a beautiful edition,” said one woman of a book. “You're reading this?” said a man (a German) of another. The book the German man picked up was Leni Riefenstahl's memoir (called
Leni Riefenstahl
). Many years after her death, Riefenstahl remains, to understate matters massively, a controversial character. She was a film director (most famously of the Nazi propaganda film
Triumph of the Will
) and a dancer, and a first-class mountaineer. She might have ranked as one of the twentieth century's most bad-ass humans except that she was, as bluntly articulated by one of the “Gypsy” extras Riefenstahl used in a film before sending her off to a concentration camp, “friends with Hitler” and (again, to massively understate matters), “not a good person.” For sure Riefenstahl is a curious case study of what people disallow themselves from knowing when that knowledge is incriminatory or inconvenient. I told the German I'd stopped two-thirds of the way through Riefenstahl's memoir. Her narcissism began to grate, also the tragically comic omissions, the alternating tone of self-aggrandizement
and self-pity. Theatrically flawed people are fascinating, but only to a point. For me that point was page 459.

The man told me that his company—he owns a film production company—was making a movie about Leni Riefenstahl. (His was not the first Riefenstahl biopic project, he said. A famous and reputedly “intellectual” actress had been involved in an earlier Riefenstahl project; she'd finally quit because of the script.)

“What was wrong with the script?” I asked.

What was wrong with her script, he said—and what was wrong with his script, and what made Riefenstahl a tricky character to portray—was the character's failure to change.

“She was the same her whole life,” he said. “She was just the same person.” She only ever cared about making films. She only ever cared about her career. She was always arrogant, narcissistic, unrepentant.

Certainly I understood how this could be boring; hadn't I stopped reading her memoirs for similar reasons? All the same, the criticism struck me as a failure of imagination. (To be fair to this man, it was less his personal failure than a failure of the audience's or the “market's” imagination, to which, as the owner of a production company, he is beholden.) I countered like the teacher I usually am when I'm not with my husband on his fellowship in Germany.

Wasn't Riefenstahl's failure to change, despite the fact that so much change was happening around her, of potentially great moral and dramatic interest? Could you argue that she might be the
more
fascinating and enigmatic character than the character who, predictably, changed? Thomas Mann, for example, changed. At the beginning,
yes, Mann failed to behave in a terribly brave or upstanding manner; he was timid in the face of the Nazi rise. Maintaining his career meant more than speaking out on behalf of his friends and colleagues—some of whom were deported—or even supporting his children, who were actively anti-Nazi, and from whose activism he initially distanced himself. But after Mann was forced to leave Germany he made twenty-five radio broadcasts for Germans on behalf of the Allied forces, all of which began, “German listeners!” and which were scathingly anti-Nazi.

Mann's an example of the morally understandable and also the morally reassuring character. From personal experience, I can attest that it's uncomfortable to confront dramatic situations in which the “protagonists” are not redeemed, in which they are so self-absorbed that nothing penetrates their shell of self-interest and self-promotion, not even mass murder. But why must that make for a bad script?

On the morning of 9/11, my husband and I were charged with caring for the girlfriend of my sort-of cousin. While the towers burned and the death count, at that point, was estimated at ten thousand, she arrived at our house with a meditation candle and dessert. She worried all day about her relationship with my cousin. Did he love her enough? She just wasn't sure if he did. She pestered us with questions about my cousin as we walked to a clinic, as we tried to give blood. What did we think? What did we know? Did we think their relationship could last? Did we think he
really
loved her? Her character was so inconceivable even though it was standing right in front of us. We finally left her in our apartment and went to someone else's apartment. We had to escape her because she was so disturbingly unchanged. How could that be? How could
she
be? We didn't and still can't make sense of her. Our inability to understand makes her a regular character in our couple narratives, the ones we tell about the weirdness we've weathered together. We talk about the woman who, when the city was burning around her, stopped to buy dessert. Probably her life would also make for a bad script. Yet I don't think there's a story we've told more often to others than hers.

Today I got an e-mail that said, “Good luck, pursecake!” This was the nicest e-mail I'd received in months. Who knew me as “pursecake,” besides myself? And not even really myself? I'd had to change my usernames recently, because my old ones no longer worked. I chose “pursecake” because it makes me think of my daughter, for whom we once made a purse-shaped cake, sort of but not entirely because she loves money.

But who was wishing me luck? And luck with what? With my hearing test at the ear doctor's? With the swanky party I was attending later that day, and where I hoped not to make myself look a fool? With remembering to pay my speeding ticket before my license was suspended?

I checked to see who had sent me this e-mail. eBay had sent it. eBay was hoping that I'd win a vintage tuxedo shirt I'd bid on. Good luck, pursecake!

I should have felt deflated or idiotic, but I didn't. It didn't matter that the e-mail came from eBay, and that eBay was not a person. People's sincerity is sometimes not totally sincere. There are complications, modulations.
People who wish you luck in winning don't always totally want you to win. eBay wanted me to win. eBay also wanted other people to win. eBay wants everybody to win! When eBay really wants everybody to win, the real winner is eBay. The sentiment was sincere. eBay wanted me to win this shirt. I did.

Today instead of working I watched YouTube interviews. For no particular reason I watched all of the interviews I could find by a singer I like and know nothing about. Now I know quite a lot about him. Before he became a songwriter and singer he was a drunk and a drug addict. Now he responds to interviewer prompts such as, “It's interesting that, in this song, you don't judge the teacher who raped you and then later killed himself,” with stock recovery responses.
I was angry at others as a way to express my anger at myself. Now I've accepted who I am and no longer need to blame other people for my shortcomings
.

Until this year, I was not the sort of person to find sentences like these profound.

My best friend from college recently started saying such sentences. After years of psychotherapy, she's switched gears, found a guru. This guru has, as gurus must, an origin tale, a story tracking her path to enlightenment. Roughly it goes like this. Before she became a guru, she valued what people tend to value—love, money, real estate. Her first marriage failed. Her second marriage failed. She became a shut-in, subsisting on ice cream and pain pills. One day she awoke on the floor of her bedroom
and saw a mouse crawling across a foot. She was filled with joy. She saw it as her job to love everyone and everything unconditionally, but her conviction was still challenged by old anxieties that cropped up every once in a while. She created a series of questions to ask herself whenever she felt tempted by real estate, or jealous of other people's money, or self-pitying, or hopeless, or if she could not find beauty in even the most agreed-upon beautiful things, never mind a mouse.

These questions she asked herself are now an official product, a mental map you can buy or a head dance you can be taught. I am sounding dismissive here, but I really don't view this guru's work dismissively. She has measurably helped my friend. I was hoping she might help me. I did not feel entirely ready yet to be helped, but I did feel open to the possibility—maybe this guru could make my life better, too.

Recently I met this friend and another friend at a cabin on the coast. The cabin was runty and constructed of press board and plastic and propped up by rusted propane tanks. The view was astonishing. We are scarcely ever together nowadays, the three of us; we are far-flung in more ways than just geography. When we do meet, confession is our shortcut to intimacy. We bypass the years and our widening differences by confessing. We confess and confess and confess. We confess about our bad behavior toward husbands, children, other friends, ourselves. We are each other's priests.

On this night, I had my usual confessions to make; I waited for my turn. Though the confessions on offer (I thought) were good ones, my friend with the guru seemed distracted. When I finished, she wanted to know with whom I'd shared one particular confession. She wanted to
know if I'd shared it with another woman I see more frequently than I see her.

I had.

The next morning I woke up to ocean and a painful amount of sun. My friend emerged from the small back bedroom; she announced that she'd spent the past two hours asking herself the questions she'd learned from the guru. She'd gone to bed upset last night by what she saw as my betrayal (she understandably felt betrayed that I would share news with this other woman before I shared it with her); now, however, she was perfectly fine.

We ate breakfast. My friend was calm but also unsettlingly distant. I wondered if she'd experienced a moment of acceptance in that bedroom; what she'd accepted had something to do with my inability to stop disappointing her. She was finally resigned to this fact, and her resignation required she stop investing any hope in me whatsoever.

Formerly I'd loved her guru. Now I was not so in love with her. I was emotionally quite dependent on the dysfunction my friend and I had co-developed over the past twenty-five years. I depended on my friend to get mad at me for doing mostly totally reasonable things that I then got mad at
her
for being mad about. I started to worry: our durable friend romance, the one that survived, and even thrived upon, our regular breakups, was finished. Her guru had killed it. Gurus, I'd always thought, were so airy and ephemeral—they encouraged your thoughts to drift around wearing the mind equivalent of an Indian gauze dress with a tinkling bell hem—but my friend's guru, it seemed, was the most practical of taskmasters. She dressed people's minds in an off-the-rack skirt suit and sent them to an office job where they laid people off.

I tried to remain circumspect in the face of my friend's
resignation; maybe it was for the best. How much longer could we act like schoolgirls with crushes on one another? We were forty-four years old.

After breakfast we all three sat on the rocks. We arranged ourselves at distances from one another so great that we nearly needed to shout to be heard above the gulls. We were literally speaking over a small crevasse. My two friends assumed one plane, like jurors; I faced them with my back to the sun. They began to worry aloud about me. Their worry amounted to a personality critique, but whatever. They cared enough to care. After my close run-in with total guru annihilation, I thankfully accepted their concern.

Whenever I am not with them, they said, I am Not Me; I become a person they are certain, because they know me so well, I am not.

There is a complicated truth to these claims. Historically, when I am in a shallow tizzy, or just really depressed, I do tend to pull away from these two friends. Historically, the explanation for my disappearance has been: they know me too well. When I'm not interested in (or capable of) being who, at my core,
I am
, I steer way clear of the two people who hold me to this unappealing standard.

However—and maybe it was because the guru had messed with things, and so now our narrative seemed open to restructuring—a part of me wanted to disagree with this long-running interpretation. A part of me wanted to point out that this Not Me facet they strongly disliked—this “other” buzzy and irreverent me—was, if we were to deal in pure percentages, the person I predominantly am. I liked people, lots and lots and lots of them. I wanted people around me much of the time, and I wanted for the
most part to never directly speak about serious matters. If a serious matter arose, I wanted to dispatch it in an unserious manner (which manner, in my opinion, would nonetheless result in its very seriously being dealt with). What they were saying, in short, I wanted to point out to them, was this: we are worried about you because we don't like who you are.

I said nothing. I chose not to seize the restructuring opportunity offered by the guru. Instead I listened; I nodded. The sun was hot on my back. I was struck by a guru-worthy koan to describe my current situation:
To face away from the sun is not to hide from it
. My friends and I have our friendship origin tales, just like the guru has hers. These are our paths to enlightenment, or maybe just our paths to this cabin, to this beach, to this day, to our girlhoods, to which we are fast losing the connection. I believe it is not wrong to protect these stories, even if such protection requires a little dishonesty in the form of silence. I did worry, however, that the crevasse over which we faced one another would eventually grow too wide. As yet, it had not. I was thankful for this. It was nearing noon now. My shoulders were starting to burn.