The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 2: March 3

Today my friend asked me, “Am I crazy?” She is convinced that her husband is having an affair. We were in her apartment drinking beer. She seemed oddly energized by the prospect of this affair, as if we were gossiping about the maybe-infidelity of a person not married to her.

Her husband, she said, had become friendly with the single woman who used to live in the neighboring apartment. The woman had since moved to San Francisco; however, she called her husband regularly to check on her mail. Was there a package for her in their lobby? According to my friend, her husband always left the room so he could speak to the woman in private.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Am I crazy?”

I considered the evidence. Was this all she had? I asked. If so, I was sorry to disappoint her — she really was so excited that her husband might be cheating on her — but I did not think her husband was having an affair. She was, perhaps, being a little crazy. At the worst, it sounded as though her husband had a crush on their former neighbor, and if he did, she should continue to rejoice. I’d recently heard of a study that concluded: the marriages that last are the ones in which the two members regularly develop (but do not act upon) extramarital infatuations. Here was proof of her marriage’s durability. Her husband wanted to sleep with a woman who was not his wife.

Then she told me more. A few weeks ago, her family had gone on vacation to Lake Tahoe. On the morning of their departure, her husband claimed he needed to stay in New York to deal with a work emergency. She flew ahead with their son; he flew to San Francisco a day later and spent a night in the city before meeting his family at the lake. Less than a week into the vacation, he claimed he needed to return home earlier than expected (another work emergency). He drove to San Francisco, ostensibly to catch a plane. Ostensibly, he missed it. Again, he spent the night in the city. He’d told his wife he’d stayed on a friend’s couch, but she later learned, by finding a receipt in his pocket, that he’d checked into a hotel. When asked why he’d decided against staying with the friend (she did not ask him why he had lied), he said, “I’m too old to sleep on couches.”

Now I told her: I didn’t think she was crazy. If my husband behaved that way, I’d know he was having an affair. But their relationship wasn’t our relationship. A couch, a crush, a hotel. What might appear suspicious in my husband might not appear suspicious in hers.

I tried to interpret her husband’s behavior using their relationship template.

I still thought he was having an affair.

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” I repeated.

We wondered if she should break into his e-mail account. We were less concerned about the ethics of this breach than we were about its uselessness in court, so to speak. Reading her husband’s e-mail was the equivalent of an illegal phone tap. She wouldn’t be able to confront him with evidence procured in this manner. If she admitted that she’d read his e-mail, the marital wrongdoing could be shifted to her. She’d read his e-mail! What a trespass, what a violation! No wonder he’d needed to have an affair! Etc.

Let’s say, I said, that she read his e-mail and confirmed he was having an affair. How might she “stumble” upon further proof she could actually use? We talked about credit card receipts and whether or not a big charge at a hotel bar might signal that he hadn’t been drinking alone. I wondered if she might accidentally discover a suspicious text string. A chain of acronyms exchanged with their former neighbor that might suggest — they were speaking in code to avoid detection.

“But,” she said, returning to the possibility of reading his e-mail, “do I really want to find what I might find?”

She quoted something I’d apparently said to her last winter — that if my husband read my e-mail, he deserved to learn whatever he discovered. I didn’t remember saying this. On reflection, however, it seemed exactly the type of thing I would say. I stood by it.

“Maybe you don’t want to know,” I observed of her husband’s possible infidelity. What would knowing get her? Her husband had slipped up once before they were married and evaded conviction despite compelling testimony against him — a statement from the woman he’d slept with, for example. He did not confess nor deny when presented with this testimony. He simply refused to admit the evidence to the court. (He refused to accept that there was a court.)

My friend returned to the original evidence, such as it existed. “I don’t know,” she said. “Am I just crazy?” We’d entered a loop. Each time we found ourselves at a potential course of action, we’d shy away from the exit and the loop would reboot. Am I just crazy?

Our loop reminded me of a recent interaction with a different friend. She’s an artist; I am not. She’d tried as an artist (as opposed to a psychologist or, I don’t know, a dentist) to demystify for me my obsession with certain objects. One of these objects is a hot-water tap handle I found in my house in Maine where, when I’m not teaching in New York, I live. The tap handle is enamel; it is cracked. I carry it with me everywhere. Once purely functional, it now serves no other purpose than to weigh down my bag. Every day, before I start writing, I draw this tap handle. The artist diagnosed my attraction to it as l’amour fou. André Breton, she told me, identified the affliction in his book Mad Love. He and Alberto Giacometti — depressed at the time — were walking through a Paris flea market in the spring of 1934; Breton feared that Giacometti might fall in love with a girl and, as a consequence of his sudden happiness or his brighter outlook on life, ruin a statue on which he was working and to which Breton felt obsessively attached. Breton worried in particular about the placement of the statue’s arms, which were raised in a way to suggest they were holding or protecting something.

He was right to worry. Due to precisely the sort of fleeting “feminine intervention” Breton feared, Giacometti fell in love with a girl and lowered the statue’s arms. (Once this feminine intervention concluded, Breton reports of the arms, “with some modifications, they were reestablished the next day in their proper place.”) What bothered Breton was not the loss of modesty implied by the lowered arms. What bothered him was the “disappearance of the invisible but present object.”

My tap handle — according to my artist friend, and also to Breton — was the invisible but present object, invisible in that I could not perceive its use or meaning, but I always needed it around. My friend’s husband’s maybe-infidelity was also the invisible but present object. My friend did not want her suspicion — which sustained the possibility that her husband both was and was not having an affair — to disappear by exposing it. She feared the lowering of hands. Still, I said to her as we drank beer, You are not crazy. You are not crazy. This is what she needs from me, I guess — the opportunity to perpetually wonder about her husband without the threat of ever knowing what, in a marriage, is or is not there.