The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 48: August 6

Today we tried to socioeconomically identify the people whose house my friend is renting for the week. My friend is an artist, England-born, contrarian. He paints representations of historically seismic thought shifts. His ability to contextualize data, and divine from it a visual map, is applied, in his off hours, to his immediate surroundings. He decided that the family from which he was renting his house was anti-intellectual, conservative, and Francophobic. The books in the house, he said, supported his theory, which he delivered as though it were the third law of thermodynamics (one of his favorite laws). I defended the family, knowing them not at all; bookshelves of summerhouses are filled with dishy nonsense, I said. They indicate how a person understands time that is meant to be wasted.

He fetched from the shelves a novel that appears in many houses around here because the novel is about this town, and the writer wrote about real people and changed their names, and so everyone bought the novel to see if and how they’d been portrayed. He read the first sentence aloud. “All places where the French settled early have corruption at their heart, a kind of soft, rotten glow, like the phosphorescence of decaying wood, that is oddly attractive.”

This proved everything and nothing, and led to a conversation about la tendresse, which the artist refused to define, save to say, “If you don’t know about la tendresse, you’ll understand nothing about nineteenth-century French literature.” Another friend explained la tendresse as the sexual education of French daughters by French mothers. Education of actual sexual techniques? we asked. Or just wiles? What class of French women inculcated their daughters via la tendresse? And what did this say about the man we knew who’d married and then divorced a millionaire and built a boat named Tendress?

This discussion, such as it was, dovetailed with a tendresse-related conversation I’d had two nights previous. In August, in Maine, it can sometimes seem that everyone everywhere is having the same conversation between the hours of five and eight p.m. The summer bleeds into an extended talking twilight. I was discussing with two women how best to raise a girl so that she won’t become anorexic and won’t approach sex guiltily, because many of us had mothers who came of age during an era when to have casual sex with a guy was thereby to inspire his disrespect, and to subsequently be seen as a woman of low morals, i.e., unmarriageable and worthy only of fucking. I admitted to telling my eight-year-old daughter, who has a great body but is no waif, that she shouldn’t wish to be really skinny, because in my experience (I told her) once you start dating, you’ll get a lot of action if you’ve got meat on your bones. I didn’t say “if you look fuckable,” but that’s what I meant. I was insecure about my non-waify body when I was a teenager, but I had a boyfriend who guaranteed me that my body was “fuckable,” and this seemed a decent runner-up distinction if I couldn’t look like a model. I then emphasized to my daughter that her self-worth should have nothing to do with what other people thought (thereby contradicting myself); that she had to believe her body to be fuckable, i.e., if only she wanted to fuck it, that would be ideal, and that would make other people, girls or boys or whatever, want to fuck it more. Again I communicated all of this using none of these words. I admitted to my friends that maybe it was totally screwed up to mention this stuff to my daughter, and that I basically really didn’t know how to talk about it at all. But now this conversation with my daughter could be viewed, more nobly, as my attempt at la tendresse Américaine. Set a good example. Want to fuck yourself so that others want to fuck you too.