The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 39: July 22

Today I wrote a long e-mail to my London friend. Sometimes I spend more time writing e-mails to this friend than I do writing what I’m supposed to be writing. I justify this time expense by viewing these e-mails as a substitute for my otherwise nonexistent epistolary record. Regularly I’ll put my friend’s name into the search bar and read what I wrote to her a year ago. I’ll be reminded of a good meal I’d forgotten about, or that last August I was kind of blue. My friend from London is an excellent e-mailer — she’s inquisitive and hilarious; she uses ALL CAPS when she’s trying to make a POINT. She comes from an Australian family of rain people. She forwards me her mother’s vacation-planning e-mails as proof of her bloodline’s savantism. Her mother, prior to a family vacation, will research a rental property and draft for her sons and daughters an account of the house and its recreations worthy of a presidential advance team. For example:

PRAWNING

Best done in a boat. However can wade out from northwest side of bridge. Must have a good light and it must be on a moon free night. There are 2 prawn nets in shed. The prawns swim out on the outgoing tide — i.e., I think best just after the tide turns — check this at Tackle World.

We share evidence. We exchange phone photos of our outfits. She sent me pictures of her wedding dress, which she’d borrowed from the ’80s singer Sade. We explained ourselves to each other. Our histories. When did we lose our virginity, and to whom? Why did my first husband and I divorce? What happened to the guy she married in the Sade dress, through whom she got her UK passport?

Our e-mails have proven to be an important archival exercise because I’m starting to forget important life events. The reason I’m forgetting is because it’s been a while since I’ve articulated my life history to anyone. The depth and range of the intel I was meant to provide to my London friend — this I hadn’t done since I’d met my second husband. It was fun to do it again but it was also hard. Especially over e-mail, or especially in writing, and especially when you are a writer. It was hard to tell the truth, is what I’m saying. I tried to tell it, but I was aware of how each sentence had a million conditional offshoots. Like if you were to diagram a sentence for meaning, rather than grammar, that’s what each sentence might have resembled. I was trying to be charismatic, and in doing so I probably didn’t tell the truthiest truths. I never made stuff up. But I did strive to be entertaining. Such embellishments do not constitute lies. They constitute your personality. But your personality can seem like a store front for lie vending if what you’ve said threatens to find a wider audience.

I once arranged to meet a friend at a bar. He was supposed to interview me for a magazine — we were meant to have a “conversation” between writers — but our endeavor was doomed from the start. The bar I chose turned out to be much louder and scarier than I’d recalled. It opened at eight a.m. By four-thirty p.m. the clientele were drawing shivs over the jukebox queue. We ordered drinks and tried to make the best of it, but his tape recorder wouldn’t turn on. Instead we used my phone to record our conversation. We talked about books and writing for about five minutes before sliding into the sloppy, erratic rhythm of our surroundings. We talked about the things you talk about when you’re drinking bad vodka. We remarked, with some amazement, that neither of us found any of our young students attractive, and never had. Weren’t professors supposed to want to sleep with their students? What was wrong with us? We discussed one disastrous man’s disastrous love life. We discussed alcoholics we knew. When we were leaving, I realized I’d forgotten to shut off my phone after the brief books discussion concluded, and that our entire conversation had been recorded. Meanwhile, the file was due to one of the magazine’s interns the next day for transcription. I panicked. Probably this intern wouldn’t do anything with the file, but who knew? He or she could forward it to someone, and soon we’d be reading on the Internet damning shit about people attributed to us. Nothing I said on that recording differed from what I believed; I stood by all of it. But the way I’d articulated certain truths — there was falseness involved. There was a persona involved, one that I used with this friend, and that I used with other friends, too, but I did not use it with everyone. My friend and I considered pretending that the recording had failed, that there was no interview, sorry. Then, at home, I figured out how to split the file. It necessitated erasing the parts I supposedly no longer wanted. Suddenly, however, I was loath to lose them. It reminded me of the newspaper sections I never care to read until I am kneeling by the woodstove, balling them up to start a fire.