The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 13: July 19

Today I realized it was July 19. This hasn’t been the case in pretty much forever. For years I’ve gone days without knowing the date. I exist in relation to dates I’ve missed. Suddenly I am forty. Suddenly I was forty a long time ago.

The same is true with minutes. The first occasion I had to notice minutes was when I worked briefly as a hostess in a restaurant. The owner was Lebanese; he spoke French and rode a motorcycle and told me that my outfits weren’t sexy enough for me to capably say, “Your table is ready.” I hated working there for many reasons, but mostly I hated my time responsibilities — I could never lose myself in the work; I could never look at my watch and be amazed that three hours had passed. Quickly passing time stressed me out, because if time passed too quickly then people wouldn’t have time to order dessert and time to pay their checks, and come time there would be no tables for the 8:45 reservations. I obsessively monitored the clock leading up to each seating—7:25, 7:26, 7:27, 7:29, 7:30. I never didn’t know what time it was, not for one single minute did I not know. This made the shift crawl by. One night lasted a week. I quit after two days. A few years later I heard that the owner was killed on his motorcycle.

Once, however, I remember knowing what time it was for every minute, and yet this made time feel uncatchable, like a fistful of twenties the wind blew out of my hand. (This happened to me once. My first three years in New York, I lived on an avenue lined with factories and through which the wind tunneled at high speeds. This was also the only time in my life I had fistfuls of twenties because I worked, after quitting my hostess job, as a waitress paid with tips.) I’d met up with a friend in L.A. She lives in London, and at that point we’d e-mailed each other many times a day for a year, but we’d only seen each other twice, for about three days each. Nonetheless, we’d fallen into an intense friendship. We were so intense in L.A. that people mistook us for lovers. We drove to the desert for the weekend, and stayed at a very small spa hotel where all the rooms faced inward toward a thermal pool, and the high desert wind, though hot, blew through our rooms and made air-conditioning seem silly, or at least unhealthy, so we left all of the windows open. The wind was so strong it blew the water glasses off the table. It blew open our books and sped-read the pages. A marine from the local base, on leave with his wife, stayed in the room opposite ours. He liked me because I am blond and marine-friendly. He did not take to my friend, who is darkly elfin, androgynous, and wicked. We decided to mess with him. I had a very good time flashing my wedding ring and talking about my husband while rubbing my friend’s shoulders suggestively. Soon he started avoiding me. When I got into the thermal pool, he got out of it. The wind continued to blow. It blew through the days. It blew through the nights. Suddenly it was time to drive my friend back to the airport, and put her on a plane, and then probably I would not see her again for six months or even a year. On the way to the airport, she pushed to stop at a museum to see Christian Marclay’s The Clock. The Clock—some call it an art installation — is also a twenty-four-hour-long movie that’s a fully functional (and visual) timepiece. Every minute of a twenty-four-hour day is accounted for by a preexisting film clip, in which a clock or a watch appears (often during a dramatic moment, or what feels like a dramatic moment, in whatever film is being sampled — there is something breathless-making about time), showing the appropriate minute (1:22, then 1:23, then 1:25, and so on).

I drove speedily — we didn’t have much time to see The Clock, and the more quickly I drove, the more time we’d have at the museum, but also the more quickly, it seemed, I’d be dropping my friend on the LAX curb. We arrived at the museum, parked, ran inside, discovered a terribly long ticket line, somehow located another not-so-terribly-long line, found a spot on a couch in the dark screening room, and watched. We’d decided beforehand that we had to leave at 3:45 for her to catch her flight. We passed our dwindling time together watching a visual representation of our dwindling time together. It confused my desire mechanism, and maybe rightly, because my desire mechanism was pretty confused. The movie made me so excited to see how the next minute (3:29, 3:30, 3:31) would be portrayed (what film clip would it be? Would I recognize it?), but I didn’t want the time to pass because then we’d have to leave, and then I’d have to say good-bye, and then I wouldn’t see my friend again for what felt like an eternity if measured by the time standards we encountered on that couch. Time crawled. Time flew. We broke our vow and stayed until 3:58.