The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 30: September 15

Today I went to a dinner party at Edith Wharton’s house. I wish this were as it sounds—Edith Wharton invited me for dinner! — but it wasn’t. Edith Wharton was dead this evening. She was seventy-five years dead. Instead I’d been invited by a Wharton scholar to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Wharton’s birth. For sure I should have been up on my Whartonalia. I should have improved my knowledge of her life beyond “she had a crappy first marriage just like I did!” Fortunately, at dinner, I sat next to two kids, and instead of talking about Wharton we talked about our fears of bears and sharks. Because I am considering a long-distance ocean swim next summer, I was coming to know a lot about sharks. I knew, because an all-but-dissertation philosopher had told me, that since 1582 there have been only 133 reported human deaths caused by a shark. This did not make the kids, nor did it make me, less convinced that we’d be killed by one.

Then I chatted with the director of The Mount (this is the name of Wharton’s house), and she had shark fatality — type numbers at her fingertips about Wharton, and she seemed mildly appalled I should know so little about the house to which I’d been invited, other than that Wharton had lived in it. Finally I escaped. I found a writer I’ve always thought to be very beautiful and affixed myself to her. This writer has a serene face, and no other writer I know is serene at all. Especially their faces are not serene. Because of her face, I remember very clearly the first time I saw this woman. This was, give or take, late 1997 or early 1998. I was waitressing at a restaurant owned by a former actress who required me to French-braid my hair. One night this writer came in for dinner. Everyone glowed in this restaurant — the lighting was incredibly flattering, and the customers always looked marriageable, which was probably why a good many of them came here to become engaged — but she glowed differently. Beatific, I suppose, is the word for her type of glow. Her glow was the glow of her spirit or her soul or something that went deeper than skin and diet and lighting.

At the time I hadn’t published anything. I was too inhibited to introduce myself to people who I thought would have no interest in knowing me. I could give them a reason to talk to me by saying, I am just such a huge fan of your work, but that’s brownnosing where I come from, even if you truly mean the compliment. For this reason I didn’t introduce myself to Joan Didion, whom I’d waited on, and I didn’t introduce myself to Bret Easton Ellis, whom I’d also waited on. I didn’t say to Didion, “I can quote lines from your work.” I didn’t say to Ellis, “I snorted honorific lines off your book jacket.” I said to Didion and to Ellis, “Would you like to see the dessert menu?”

I also didn’t introduce myself to this beatific woman. I’d read her work in magazines. She counted as a star sighting for me. And she glowed, she was really so glowy. She was glow atop of glow. I remembered her so vividly I half doubted, now that I was seeing her again, that this encounter had happened at all. I have come to that point in my life where my memories have begun interbreeding. I’d seen her, somewhere, true, but maybe not at that restaurant, and the glowy nimbus surrounding her, maybe that was just more postproduction touch-up.

So I talked to this woman at Wharton’s house. She told me about the smart life choices she’d made, which made me realize that she wasn’t inherently serene, she was purposefully and strategically so, meaning somehow serenity wasn’t an oxymoronic pursuit like it was with me, because I just get so stressed out when I’m trying to fit yoga into my day. We exchanged numbers so that we could go out to dinner the following night with the other Wharton celebrants. We decided to drive to the restaurant together. I picked her up. It felt like a first date. After dinner, after we’d had some drinks, and as I was driving her back to her hotel, we did the friend version of parking. We kept the car running, and we sat in the dark and we talked. I confessed to her that I remembered the first time I’d seen her, or I thought I had. I didn’t want this to sound creepy; I wanted it to sound complimentary. I remember the first time I ever saw you! But maybe I don’t remember seeing you — maybe I just imagined it! Maybe I have a fantasy about the first time I ever saw you! I was growing creepier by the contingency. But when I mentioned the name of the restaurant, she stared at me differently. She said she remembered that night, and she also remembered seeing me. We had seen each other! Maybe she was having a false memory inspired by my false memory, who knows.

She obviously worried that her remembering me also sounded a little creepy — why would a semi-famous person remember a waitress? — so she explained her memory by saying, “You’re just so distinctive looking.” Which no one has ever said to me before, certainly not all of those people who claim that I look like their cousin.

Regardless, I started to think about women who look at women and not because they want to sleep with them. Some women some other women like to look at. My first husband used to say, sort of jokingly, that women deem other women beautiful only when those women aren’t really. He believed that women are sometimes so competitive that they can’t admit that the beautiful women are beautiful; they can only call beautiful the not-really-beautiful ones. But I don’t agree. The women I find beautiful are so beautiful that I never forget the first time I saw them. I wait for years to see them again.