Time Traveler's Wife
By Audrey Niffenegger
MacAdam/Cage Publishing
Copyright © 2003
Audrey Niffenegger
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1931561648
Chapter One
THE MAN
OUT OF TIME
Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.
But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
... Ah, but what can we take along
into that other realm? Not the art of looking,
which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.
The sufferings, then. And, above all, the heaviness,
and the long experience of love,-just what is wholly
unsayable.
- from The Ninth Duino Elegy,
RAINER MARIA RILKE,
translated by STEPHEN MITCHELL
FIRST DATE, ONE
Saturday, October 26, 1991 (Henry is 28, Clare is 20)
CLARE: The library is cool and smells like carpet cleaner,
although all I can see is marble. I sign the Visitors' Log:
Clare Abshire, 11:15 10-26-91 Special Collections. I have
never been in the Newberry Library before, and now that I've
gotten past the dark, foreboding entrance I am excited. I have
a sort of Christmas-morning sense of the library as a big box
full of beautiful books. The elevator is dimly lit, almost
silent. I stop on the third floor and fill out an application
for a Reader's Card, then I go upstairs to Special
Collections. My boot heels rap the wooden floor. The room is
quiet and crowded, full of solid, heavy tables piled with
books and surrounded by readers. Chicago autumn morning light
shines through the tall windows. I approach the desk and
collect a stack of call slips. I'm writing a paper for an art
history class. My research topic is the Kelmscott Press
Chaucer. I look up the book itself and fill out a call slip
for it. But I also want to read about papermaking at
Kelmscott. The catalog is confusing. I go back to the desk to
ask for help. As I explain to the woman what I am trying to
find, she glances over my shoulder at someone passing behind
me. "Perhaps Mr. DeTamble can help you," she says. I turn,
prepared to start explaining again, and find myself face to
face with Henry.
I am speechless. Here is Henry, calm, clothed, younger than I
have ever seen him. Henry is working at the Newberry Library,
standing in front of me, in the present. Here and now. I am
jubilant. Henry is looking at me patiently, uncertain but
polite.
"Is there something I can help you with?" he asks.
"Henry!" I can barely refrain from throwing my arms around
him. It is obvious that he has never seen me before in his
life.
"Have we met? I'm sorry, I don't...." Henry is glancing around
us, worrying that readers, co-workers are noticing us,
searching his memory and realizing that some future self of
his has met this radiantly happy girl standing in front of
him. The last time I saw him he was sucking my toes in the
Meadow.
I try to explain. "I'm Clare Abshire. I knew you when I was a
little girl ..." I'm at a loss because I am in love with a man
who is standing before me with no memories of me at all.
Everything is in the future for him. I want to laugh at the
weirdness of the whole thing. I'm flooded with years of
knowledge of Henry, while he's looking at me perplexed and
fearful. Henry wearing my dad's old fishing trousers,
patiently quizzing me on multiplication tables, French verbs,
all the state capitals; Henry laughing at some peculiar lunch
my seven-year-old self has brought to the Meadow; Henry
wearing a tuxedo, undoing the studs of his shirt with shaking
hands on my eighteenth birthday. Here! Now! "Come and have
coffee with me, or dinner or something...." Surely he has to
say yes, this Henry who loves me in the past and the future
must love me now in some bat-squeak echo of other time. To my
immense relief he does say yes. We plan to meet tonight at a
nearby Thai restaurant, all the while under the amazed gaze of
the woman behind the desk, and I leave, forgetting about
Kelmscott and Chaucer and floating down the marble stairs,
through the lobby and out into the October Chicago sun,
running across the park scattering small dogs and squirrels,
whooping and rejoicing.
HENRY: It's a routine day in October, sunny and crisp. I'm at
work in a small windowless humidity-controlled room on the
fourth floor of the Newberry, cataloging a collection of
marbled papers that has recently been donated. The papers are
beautiful, but cataloging is dull, and I am feeling bored and
sorry for myself. In fact, I am feeling old, in the way only a
twenty-eight-year-old can after staying up half the night
drinking overpriced vodka and trying, without success, to win
himself back into the good graces of Ingrid Carmichel. We
spent the entire evening fighting, and now I can't even
remember what we were fighting about. My head is throbbing. I
need coffee. Leaving the marbled papers in a state of
controlled chaos, I walk through the office and past the
page's desk in the Reading Room. I am halted by Isabelle's
voice saying, "Perhaps Mr. DeTamble can help you," by which
she means "Henry, you weasel, where are you slinking off to?"
And this astoundingly beautiful amber-haired tall slim girl
turns around and looks at me as though I am her personal
Jesus. My stomach lurches. Obviously she knows me, and I don't
know her. Lord only knows what I have said, done, or promised
to this luminous creature, so I am forced to say in my best
librarianese, "Is there something I can help you with?" The
girl sort of breathes "Henry!" in this very evocative way that
convinces me that at some point in time we have a really
amazing thing together. This makes it worse that I don't know
anything about her, not even her name. I say "Have we met?"
and Isabelle gives me a look that says You asshole. But the
girl says, "I'm Clare Abshire. I knew you when I was a little
girl," and invites me out to dinner. I accept, stunned. She is
glowing at me, although I am unshaven and hung over and just
not at my best. We are going to meet for dinner this very
evening, at the Beau Thai, and Clare, having secured me for
later, wafts out of the Reading Room. As I stand in the
elevator, dazed, I realize that a massive winning lottery
ticket chunk of my future has somehow found me here in the
present, and I start to laugh. I cross the lobby, and as I run
down the stairs to the street I see Clare running across
Washington Square, jumping and whooping, and I am near tears
and I don't know why.
Later that evening:
HENRY: At 6:00 p.m. I race home from work and attempt to make
myself attractive. Home these days is a tiny but insanely
expensive studio apartment on North Dearborn; I am constantly
banging parts of myself on inconvenient walls, countertops and
furniture. Step One: unlock seventeen locks on apartment door,
fling myself into the living room-which-is-also-my-bedroom and
begin stripping off clothing. Step Two: shower and shave. Step
Three: stare hopelessly into the depths of my closet,
gradually becoming aware that nothing is exactly clean. I
discover one white shirt still in its dry cleaning bag. I
decide to wear the black suit, wing tips, and pale blue tie.
Step Four: don all of this and realize I look like an FBI
agent. Step Five: look around and realize that the apartment
is a mess. I resolve to avoid bringing Clare to my apartment
tonight even if such a thing is possible. Step Six: look in
full-length bathroom mirror and behold angular, wild-eyed 6'
1" ten-year-old Egon Schiele look-alike in clean shirt and
funeral director suit. I wonder what sorts of outfits this
woman has seen me wearing, since I am obviously not arriving
from my future into her past wearing clothes of my own. She
said she was a little girl? A plethora of unanswerables runs
through my head. I stop and breathe for a minute. Okay. I grab
my wallet and my keys, and away I go: lock the thirty-seven
locks, descend in the cranky little elevator, buy roses for
Clare in the shop in the lobby, walk two blocks to the
restaurant in record time but still five minutes late. Clare
is already seated in a booth and she looks relieved when she
sees me. She waves at me like she's in a parade.
"Hello," I say. Clare is wearing a wine-colored velvet dress
and pearls. She looks like a Botticelli by way of John Graham:
huge gray eyes, long nose, tiny delicate mouth like a geisha.
She has long red hair that covers her shoulders and falls to
the middle of her back. Clare is so pale she looks like a
waxwork in the candlelight. I thrust the roses at her. "For
you."
"Thank you," says Clare, absurdly pleased. She looks at me and
realizes that I am confused by her response. "You've never
given me flowers before."
I slide into the booth opposite her. I'm fascinated. This
woman knows me; this isn't some passing acquaintance of my
future hegiras. The waitress appears and hands us menus.
"Tell me," I demand.
"What?"
"Everything. I mean, do you understand why I don't know you?
I'm terribly sorry about that-"
"Oh, no, you shouldn't be. I mean, I know ... why that is."
Clare lowers her voice. "It's because for you none of it has
happened yet, but for me, well, I've known you for a long
time."
Continues...
Excerpted from Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger
Copyright © 2003 by Audrey Niffenegger.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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