The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 70: October 4

Today I almost told a woman I barely know that I loved her. This woman is the mother of my son’s friend. She and I are also sort of friends. It’s hard to make new friends at this stage of life, but she and I are trying. I always want new friends, but I know what it takes to make a good one. It takes years, decades, and back when I was younger I had hours and hours of those days of those years of those decades to dedicate to getting to know a friend. Now I have minutes of hours of days of years of decades. To acquire a new friend under these time restrictions would require three consecutive lives.

To compensate for the time we don’t have, this woman and I use the time we do have deeply. We tunnel in. We confess to the hand jobs we gave during our intern years to executives on commuter trains; we confess to coke habits. We talk about anxiety and marital confusion. We know such strange details about each other given the basic details that remain unknown. Are her parents alive? Where did she get married? What is her job?

The commonplace details we do discuss involve child logistics. I will get the boys and bring them here and I will leave them for an hour and then you can pick up yours and bring mine home unless you don’t have time to bring mine home in which case my husband can pick mine up and if you can’t pick up yours it’s no big deal because my husband can take yours home with us and you can pick yours up whenever and we can even feed yours dinner.

These conversations often become extremely confusing. She thinks out her hypotheticals aloud, and I can’t tell what is process and what is proposition. Sometimes I stop listening. Sometimes I hold the phone to my ear and make food with the other, or read e-mail, or fold laundry while she is working through the many permutations of tomorrow. Sometimes, when she starts to say good-bye, I have no idea what we’ve decided.

Today we were having one of these phone conversations. She talked, I emptied the dishwasher; she kept talking, I boiled water. Then she said good-bye. I started to say, “Bye, I love you.” The words were half out of my mouth before I stopped them. I hung up, panicked. What would have happened if I hadn’t caught myself? So many rules would have been violated. You cannot tell a person you love them too early. You shouldn’t tell a person you don’t love that you do. More shamefully she’d surmise, after the awkwardness, that I’d stopped listening to her, and that I’d entered that rote response zone, and I’d told her I loved her because I thought she was my husband. She’d know that I don’t always listen to my husband when we’re on the phone together, and that when I say “I love you,” it sometimes means I am too distracted by our home life to listen to him right now, because he’s out of town and I am not, and I am doing the work that he is not here to do (and which he does for me when I am not here to do it), and so I am really so busy that I don’t have time to hear about his day. I just want to say, “I love you,” which I do mean, I do love him, but I need him to be quieter so I can keep our house and family in order. I sometimes say, “I love you,” not to open up an emotional vein but to cauterize it, keep it full of blood.