The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 57: December 9

Today I am working in the library of the German villa. I have my favorite spot. Next to me are books about Germany with titles like Deutschland, Wo Ist Du? and The German Question and Other German Questions. Usually there is an actual German in this library. The German is an architect. The German architect and I bonded a few weeks ago over a building we both liked and which I’d found in the nearby woods while on a bike ride. He said about the building, in his very kind way, “I am so happy you discovered it,” which I interpreted as, “What a remarkable person you are for having the same good taste as me. I am so pleased we found each other.”

Soon afterward, the architect and I both began working in the library. All day long we spend together. His living space in the villa, I gather (from reports) is very nice and overlooks the lake. We’d commiserated over the fact that working alone, even in one’s lakefront suite, is not as appealing as grinding it out in the presence of others. We both needed someone with whom to share a glance when a man spent hours tuning the piano just outside the library doors, and then complained to a passing American, “This building is full of plaster, and plaster is the enemy of sound.” We both needed to be guilted into working longer hours, or maybe we saw it as a competition. Who would be the first to leave the library when the Berlin sun set at three-thirty p.m.? Who would be the first to crack a Berlin beer? Who would be the first to cave to the library’s chilly temperatures and start writing in gloves and a coat?

Soon this competition we were or were not in became a crush. My husband jokingly accused me. I denied nothing. It was no big deal; it was just another of my workplace infatuations. Also this architect is the age of my dad.

In the midst of what I understood as our mutual infatuation, I flew to Zurich to meet my London friend and see and experience the building/spa in the Swiss Alps. The architect was thrilled to learn I was going to visit this building that he’d already visited numerous times and about which he’d written many papers. (“I am so happy you discovered it.”)

While in Switzerland at the building, I sent the architect an e-mail — my first-ever e-mail to him — wondering about our cold library (had it snowed inside?) and asking about a nearby restaurant he’d mentioned liking.

When I returned to the villa, the architect sent me PowerPoint presentations about the building/spa and its architect (whom he considered “the world’s greatest living architect”). I sent him photos of a Swiss house built into the side of a mountain that, from a distance, looks like the site of a meteor crash. The next night — after firmly and energetically bonding over the world’s greatest living architect, thereby cementing our love via the creative genius of a third party — I ignored him. I couldn’t help myself. My teen mating instinct kicked in. (La tendresse Américaine on which I was raised deemed you must strongly discourage a man after you strongly encourage him as a way to more yet strongly encourage him.) We were at dinner with a group of people. I did not meet his eye. I very visibly engaged others in conversation. I took great pains to appear to be having quite a bit more fun while not talking to him than I ever did while talking to him.

Our romance, such as it never existed, started to wane. Either he realized that he really liked me and could not bear to be ignored but also could not, in good conscience, follow through on his desires (we were both married), and so needed to “break off” this relationship we did not have. Or he realized I was a ridiculous person who likes to play games — card games, silly games of the heart, harmless, all of them, but therein lay the problem: I was a frivolous person who just happened to share his taste in buildings. Or maybe our infatuation was entirely one-sided. Even more ridiculously, perhaps I’ve fabricated this entire situation, and he’s simply confused but more likely uninterested by my middle-school bizarreness. Recently the architect sent an e-mail to a much older woman on whom I am certain he does not have a crush. He’d written to her about a Bauhaus building. She forwarded his note to me (she knows I am also a Bauhaus fan). I saw he’d written to her, of this building, “I am so happy you discovered it.”

I am the only one working in the cold library today.