(I actually wrote this on a train a few weeks ago, but haven’t had a chance to post it until now.)
As I understand it, the Time Traveler’s Wife movie comes out this weekend. I probably won’t end up seeing it, but I did like the book, and I have a connection to the novel that’s made for a pretty good story over the years. However, it ends with a punchline that relates to the movie, and since the movie is actually coming out, I won’t really be able to tell the story any more. So I’ll retire it here — after all, what else is this site but a graveyard for my ambitions, right? Sorry, that’s depressing. This story is not:
I first picked up The Time Traveler’s Wife back when I was working at Borders. When I first came to Chicago, I planned on being in radio, but of course plans and reality are usually two different things, and so instead of actually finding a radio job, I ended up putting my vast experience in retail to work. Borders was the first place that hired me (well, the second — the first was a restaurant where I tried to wait tables, but that’s another story), and so Borders it was. I worked down at the Michigan Avenue store, that great four floors (or is it just three? Shows how long it’s been since I’ve worked there) of books right across from the Water Tower Place mall. If you’ve ever done touristy shopping on Michigan Avenue, odds are you’ve been in that Borders.
I worked there first as a cashier, because they picked me up during the holiday season, when they always need more cashiers and checkout people. Later on, I convinced them to let me stay on as a bookseller, and even later than that, I moved to another store and worked as a manager for a while. But I think the most fun I had at Borders was during my first days as a cashier — I would ride the bus down Chicago from Western all the way into the city, get off and go into the store, checking out all of the tourists and their book purchases, and then get back on the bus and go back to the apartment that my roommate and I shared. It was exciting, being in the city out on my own and making money. The Michigan Ave. store, I remember, is one of the biggest Borders stores in the country, and here I was, fresh out of my parents’ house in St. Louis, living in an apartment in Chicago and already working right in the middle of one of the biggest retail centers in the world.
When you work at Borders, you get to check out books from the store like a library. Obviously, they track what you take out, and you have a limit on how many books you can take out (and it’s not as glamorous as it sounds — they also check any bags or purses you take out of the store every night to make sure you’re not stealing), but you’re expected to know the inventory, and part of that is reading books you’re interested in. So at one point, probably January or February after that first holiday season, I decided to check out The Time Traveler’s Wife — a few of the sellers in the store said it was good, and it was definitely one of our most-requested books, so I gave it a shot. It was interesting — I was much more interested in the time travel part of the story, obviously, than the romantic part, but it held my attention until the end, wondering what was going to become of this guy who involuntarily bounced around time and his wife who had to live with him in segments. I liked it.
At one point in the book, the heroine (I forget her name — she’s played by Rachel McAdams in the movie) writes that she’s actually sitting at Borders thinking about family, or her husband, or his time traveling antics or something like that. In fact, as she wrote, she says that she’s actually sitting in the Borders on Michigan Avenue. The book takes place in Chicago — author Audrey Niffenegger lives there, and she, like pretty much everyone who lives in or has been to Chicago, had probably visited Water Tower at some point, seen the Borders, and figured, like most of the world, that it was a good place to go have a seat and think (I know — I cleaned up all of their magazines and latte cups in the cafe). So her character did the same thing. And here’s the thing about Time Traveler’s Wife: because so much of the book is about when things happen, all of the chapters are exactly marked with time, date, and place. She was at Borders on Michigan Avenue, and as I looked at the time, I realized: it was the same time period, pre-holidays, that I’d been working at Borders, my head flush with thoughts of living and working in the big city. In fact, our computers kept track of employee schedules back a few years — on a break, I went and looked up just when my schedule was that day, and sure enough, as Audrey Niffenegger’s character had sat in a fictional Borders on Michigan Avenue, I’d actually worked in the background.
This is where my silly story comes in — I always joked, after I figured this out, that whenever they made a movie of the book (I hadn’t known at the time that they would, but it certainly seemed like one of those books some film executive would buy the rights to and turn it into a movie), I’d be sure to keep an eye out for myself in the background, because they’d want to keep it real, right? Surely I’d be in there.
There is a fun postscript to this as well. A few years ago, I went for a local paper here in Chicago to go cover a literary reading put together by Stephen Elliot, a local author whose work I really liked. I was supposed to meet him at a cafe about an hour before the reading for a short interview, and then we’d go over to the reading together. I showed up to the cafe and met Stephen, and he was sitting at the table with a middle-aged, somewhat short and round woman with glasses. He introduced me to her as Audrey Niffenegger, a local Chicago author who was going to be reading that evening. Of course, I said, I know you! You wrote The Time Traveler’s Wife! Great book! She thanked me, and then I sat down and did the interview with Elliot while she sat there silently.
After the interview, we walked over to the reading (at a small bar a few blocks away), and Stephen found himself busy setting things up, talking to the owner of the bar and finding envelopes to give out to attendees (it was a benefit reading, for a political cause that I don’t remember). I found myself waiting for the reading, sitting at a table with a quiet Audrey Niffenegger. After a short, awkward silence, I inwardly shrugged and turned to her to say, “I really did like your book. In fact, I have a funny story about it…”
She said that yes, the coincidence was funny, but no, that she wasn’t sure if they’d ever end up making a movie or not. We talked for a while longer about books we’d liked lately — I’d recently read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and she had as well, and she talked about how she was just taking a break from writing (second-hit jitters, I surmised). Later that evening, she read a good piece about burying her cat.
I always thought that maybe she’d remember that, that maybe when they did make the movie, she’d tell them, “No wait, you have to go find this guy — he was really at Borders, and it’ll make the movie perfect.” But of course they never did. I’m not even sure if the Borders scene made it into the movie at all — it’s a woman sitting in a cafe thinking to herself, not the kind of thing you’d include in a screenplay.
But if you do go see the movie, and if they did include that scene, make sure to watch the background. You just might see a younger guy back there, a bookish gamer type, a big guy who’s supremely proud that, even though he’s working retail and he hasn’t yet gotten that radio job, he’s made it out of his hometown, out from under his parents’ wing, and out on his own in the big city.
