The time traveler's wife
Read The time traveler's wife Online
Authors: Audrey Niffenegger
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Time Travel, #Fantasy fiction, #Fantasy, #Fiction, #General, #Romance, #Domestic fiction, #Reading Group Guide, #American Science Fiction And Fantasy, #Fantasy - General, #Fiction - Fantasy, #Married people, #American First Novelists, #Librarians, #Women art students, #Romance - Time Travel, #Fiction - Romance
The
Time Traveler's
Wife
Audrey Niffenegger
Clock time is our bank manager, tax collector,
police inspector; this inner time is our wife.
—J. B. Priestley, Man and Time
LOVE AFTER LOVE
The time will come when, with elation, you will
greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will
smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the
stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to
itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for
another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit.
Feast on your life.
—Derek Walcott
For ELIZABETH HILLMAN TAMANDL May 20,
1915—December 18, 1986 and
NORBERT CHARLES TAMANDL February 11,
1915—May 23, 1957
TABLE OF CONTENTS
HOME IS ANYWHERE YOU HANG
YOUR HEAD
BETTER LIVING THROUGH
CHEMISTRY
EXPERIENCING TECHNICAL
DIFFICULTIES
THE EPISODE OF THE MONROE
STREET PARKING GARAGE
THE EPISODE OF THE MONROE
STREET PARKING GARAGE
Clare: It's hard being left behind. I wait for
Henry, not knowing where he is, wondering if he's okay. It's hard to be the one
who stays. I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way. I go to sleep alone,
and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I'm tired. I watch the wind play
with the trash that's been under the snow all winter. Everything seems simple
until you think about it. Why is love intensified by absence? Long ago, men
went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water,
scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes
unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels
like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass.
Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. Why has he
gone where I cannot follow?
Henry: How does it feel? How does it feel?
Sometimes it feels as though your attention has wandered for just an instant.
Then, with a start, you realize that the book you were holding, the red plaid
cotton shirt with white buttons, the favorite black jeans and the maroon socks
with an almost-hole in one heel, the living room, the about-to-whistle tea
kettle in the kitchen: all of these have vanished. You are standing, naked as a
jaybird, up to your ankles in ice water in a ditch along an unidentified rural
route. You wait a minute to see if maybe you will just snap right back to your
book, your apartment, et cetera. After about five minutes of swearing and
shivering and hoping to hell you can just disappear, you start walking in any
direction, which will eventually yield a farmhouse, where you have the option
of stealing or explaining. Stealing will sometimes land you in jail, but
explaining is more tedious and time-consuming and involves lying anyway, and
also sometimes results in being hauled off to jail, so what the hell. Sometimes
you feel as though you have stood up too quickly even if you are lying in bed
half asleep. You hear blood rushing in your head, feel vertiginous falling
sensations. Your hands and feet are tingling and then they aren't there at all.
You've mislocated yourself again. It only takes an instant, you have just
enough time to try to hold on, to flail around (possibly damaging yourself or
valuable possessions) and then you are skidding across the
forest-green-carpeted hallway of a Motel 6 in Athens, Ohio, at 4:16 a.m.,
Monday, August 6, 1981, and you hit your head on someone's door, causing this
person, a Ms. Tina Schulman from Philadelphia, to open this door and start
screaming because there's a naked, carpet-burned man passed out at her feet.
You wake up in the County Hospital concussed with a policeman sitting outside
your door listening to the Phillies game on a crackly transistor radio.
Mercifully, you lapse back into unconsciousness and wake up again hours later
in your own bed with your wife leaning over you looking very worried. Sometimes
you feel euphoric. Everything is sublime and has an aura, and suddenly you are
intensely nauseated and then you are gone. You are throwing up on some suburban
geraniums, or your father's tennis shoes, or your very own bathroom floor three
days ago, or a wooden sidewalk in Oak Park, Illinois, circa 1903, or a tennis
court on a fine autumn day in the 1950s, or your own naked feet in a wide
variety of times and places. How does it feel? It feels exactly like one of
those dreams in which you suddenly realize that you have to take a test you
haven't studied for and you aren't wearing any clothes. And you've left your
wallet at home. When I am out there, in time, I am inverted, changed into a
desperate version of myself. I become a thief, a vagrant, an animal who runs
and hides. I startle old women and amaze children. I am a trick, an illusion of
the highest order, so incredible that I am actually true. Is there a logic, a
rule to all this coming and going, all this dislocation? Is there a way to stay
put, to embrace the present with every cell? I don't know. There are clues; as
with any disease there are patterns, possibilities. Exhaustion,
loud noises, stresses, standing up suddenly,
flashing light—any of these can trigger an episode. But: I can be reading the
Sunday Times, coffee in hand and Clare dozing beside me on our bed and suddenly
I'm in 1976 watching my thirteen-year-old self mow my grandparents' lawn. Some
of these episodes last only moments; it's like listening to a car radio that's
having trouble holding on to a station. I find myself in crowds, audiences, mobs.
Just as often I am alone, in a field, house, car, on a beach, in a grammar
school in the middle of the night. I fear finding myself in a prison cell, an
elevator full of people, the middle of a highway. I appear from nowhere, naked.
How can I explain? I have never been able to carry anything with me. No
clothes, no money, no ID. I spend most of my sojourns acquiring clothing and
trying to hide. Fortunately I don't wear glasses. It's ironic, really. All my
pleasures are homey ones: armchair splendor, the sedate excitements of
domesticity. All I ask for are humble delights. A mystery novel in bed, the
smell of Clare's long red-gold hair damp from washing, a postcard from a friend
on vacation, cream dispersing into coffee, the softness of the skin under Clare's
breasts, the symmetry of grocery bags sitting on the kitchen counter waiting to
be unpacked. I love meandering through the stacks at the library after the
patrons have gone home, lightly touching the spines of the books. These are the
things that can pierce me with longing when I am displaced from them by Time's
whim. And Clare, always Clare. Clare in the morning, sleepy and crumple-faced.
Clare with her arms plunging into the papermaking vat, pulling up the mold and
shaking it so, and so, to meld the fibers. Clare reading, with her hair hanging
over the back of the chair, massaging balm into her cracked red hands before
bed. Clare's low voice is in my ear often. I hate to be where she is not, when
she is not. And yet, I am always going, and she cannot follow.
THE MAN OUT OF TIME
Oh not because happiness exists, that too-hasty
profit snatched from approaching loss.
But because truly being here is so much;
because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some
strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
...Ah, but what can we take along into that
other realm? Not the art of looking, which is learned so slowly, and nothing
that happened here. Nothing. The sufferings, then. And, above all, the
heaviness, and the long experience of love,—just what is wholly unsayable.
— from The Ninth Duino Elegy, Rainer Maria
Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell
Saturday, October 26, 1991 (Henry is 28, Clare
is 20)
Clare: The library is cool and smells like
carpet cleaner, although all I can see is marble. I sign the Visitors' Log:
Clare Abshire, 11:15 10-26-91 Special Collections. I have never been in the
Newberry Library before, and now that I've gotten past the dark, foreboding
entrance I am excited. I have a sort of Christmas-morning sense of the library
as a big box full of beautiful books. The elevator is dimly lit, almost silent.
I stop on the third floor and fill out an application for a Reader's Card, then
I go upstairs to Special Collections. My boot heels rap the wooden floor. The
room is quiet and crowded, full of solid, heavy tables piled with books and
surrounded by readers. Chicago autumn morning light shines through the tall
windows. I approach the desk and collect a stack of call slips. I'm writing a
paper for an art history class. My research topic is the Kelmscott Press
Chaucer. I look up the book itself and fill out a call slip for it. But I also
want to read about papermaking at Kelmscott. The catalog is confusing. I go
back to the desk to ask for help. As I explain to the woman what I am trying to
find, she glances over my shoulder at someone passing behind me. "Perhaps
Mr. DeTamble can help you," she says. I turn, prepared to start explaining
again, and find myself face to face with Henry.
I am speechless. Here is Henry, calm, clothed,
younger than I have ever seen him. Henry is working at the Newberry Library,
standing in front of me, in the present. Here and now. I am jubilant. Henry is
looking at me patiently, uncertain but polite.
"Is there something I can help you
with?" he asks.
"Henry!" I can barely refrain from
throwing my arms around him. It is obvious that he has never seen me before in
his life.