{"id":60562,"date":"2013-09-25T15:35:36","date_gmt":"2013-09-25T19:35:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=60562"},"modified":"2019-01-14T12:45:40","modified_gmt":"2019-01-14T17:45:40","slug":"bad-call-meditations-on-the-pocket-dial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/09\/25\/bad-call-meditations-on-the-pocket-dial\/","title":{"rendered":"Bad Call: Meditations on the Pocket Dial"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Brief-Encounter-Phone-Paris-Review\"<\/a>

Still from the film Brief Encounter<\/em> (1945).<\/p><\/div>\n

My acquaintances rarely call me, but their pockets and purses ring me up faithfully. So it is for the Abigails and Aarons, the Abdullahs and Aaliyahs, A.\u2009A. and AAA\u2014and one mustn\u2019t forget the Yaschas and Yankels, the Xenas and Zinos. We alphabetical extremists, we who crown and conclude your contact lists: we aren\u2019t a call away so much as a few unintended nudges. Perhaps your finger, seeking lipstick, flicks the \u201cContacts\u201d key, and your phone highlights the earliest entry\u2014dear old Abelard!\u2014and your knuckle strikes \u201cCall.\u201d Perhaps, in the thick of all that accidental action, your pinky pokes the \u201cUp\u201d button, taking you to the list\u2019s final entry: then it\u2019s cousin Zabrina you\u2019ve piped into your life.<\/p>\n

Not to alarm you; not to suggest that, at this very minute, an army of Abners and Zilpahs are listening to their cell phones with unseemly interest, picking up on secrets you had never meant to share. No, it\u2019s far more likely we\u2019re hearing whish-whoosh<\/i>, whish-whoosh<\/i>: the song of your stride.<\/p>\n

Is there anything quite like the pocket dial? Does any other form of social intercourse invite us\u2014actually, mandate us\u2014to spy on our acquaintances?<\/p>\n

Mandate? you ask. Yes, mandate, at least for a few moments. \u201cHello?\u201d we say, and listen. \u201cHello?\u201d we say again. And hear the background music of our friends\u2019 lives: the slamming doors, the roaring traffic, the whish<\/i> and the whoosh<\/i>. Where is he walking? we wonder. Why is she shouting? And we never find out. Unless, of course, we keep listening.<\/p>\n

Which I don\u2019t. Hardly ever. Only under duress. When, for instance, years ago, the enigmatic and taciturn youth I had recently started dating called me while he was catching up with his mom. This isn\u2019t invasion, I told myself guiltily, as I noted his thoughtful inquiries and nodded with approval. This is research. This is good for the team. <\/p>\n

But in some ways accidental calls are good for no one. For what happens when, fingers trembling, we lift the receiver to our ears, clear our throats, declare our excited greetings, and then hear yet another rendition of the Pocket Polka? Emotionally healthier souls might feel merely annoyed. But I feel disappointed, even vaguely insulted. Whereas before we were going happily about our lives, not even thinking<\/i> that long-lost Erica might be remembering us, planning what she might tell us, reaching for her phone\u2014now we\u2019re pondering how long-lost Erica, no matter what else she\u2019s doing, is certainly not<\/i> thinking about us, not<\/i> planning what she might tell us, not<\/i> reaching for her phone. To be pocket-dialed is to be un-called.<\/p>\n

So too with the accidental text message. Just after college, while I was living in an isolated French town, my link to the world was a tiny Nokia phone with the approximate shape and utility of an eraser. I was too cheap to buy more than ten minutes of time on it per month, and never sent texts (or textos<\/i>, as the French charmingly call them) because I had no one to send them to.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not to say I didn\u2019t receive textos<\/i>\u2014misdirected textos<\/i>, or as I came to think of them, misdirextos<\/i>. Misdirextos<\/i> that referred to friends I did not know, to outings I would not enjoy, to bars I would never see offering beers I would never sip. My eraser tended to light up just when I felt particularly lonely, and\u2014due to some cruel technological quirk\u2014it tended to receive each misdirexto<\/i> multiple times. One night I learned from an acquaintance named Jen that we would all be eating at 45 All\u00e9es Fran\u00e7ois Verdiers because her electricity was out; I should come at 8 P.M.<\/small> She delivered this news sixteen times. Twice she promised me more information when she had it, and sent me kisses. Bisous<\/em>, Jen, I thought, staring out my window at the darkening hills.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center>Sometimes, in the stiller moments of my dotage, I reminisce about the rotary phone I used as a child. It imposed particular rhythms on the act of calling: seven times you placed a finger in the wheel; seven times you traced a circle in the air. Then you heard a voice. The process felt vaguely mystical, like using an Ouija board. Once we\u2019d replaced that phone with a touch-tone model, I no longer drew circles: I punched out lines and squares and triangles. I no longer associated my friends with the groan of the turning wheel\u2014the 9 ever so slightly longer than the 8; the 1 just a blip, a cymbal crash. Instead, I heard the tinny tunes of the keypad. Now, as in a Wagner opera, an individualized musical theme preceded the voice of each friend.<\/p>\n

These old modes of calling were quirky, beautiful, and memorable (I can still sing the sequence of pitches that would conjure the voice of my best friend, circa 1996). Above all, they were complicated. Calling now is easy. Too easy: we have reached the point when the phone does the calling for you, whether you want it to or not.<\/p>\n

Despite my griping, however, I\u2019ve recently come to find pocket dials fascinating\u2014and even fun. For inadvertent calls blend the social and the private as few other phenomena do. They\u2019re a byproduct of our ultraconnected world, where everyone carries multiple gizmos capable of contacting everyone else\u2019s gizmos. And yet, in a strange way, they let us unplug. These days, when people\u2019s pockets ring me up, I find myself listening for minutes on end\u2014not when I can overhear conversation, but when I can\u2019t. In my acquaintances\u2019 pockets and pocketbooks I get a break, a snatch of calm, a moment when nothing is demanded of me. I listen to the back and forth of fabric, the inexplicable burst of laughter, the car horn blasting on the street I cannot see. This is freedom from friendliness, from conversational responsibility, from associating with the world. This, at last, is solitude.<\/p>\n

But an interestingly communal solitude. People may not know they\u2019re calling me, but the fact of their call testifies to our relationships, and to the ways in which our networks can buzz to life at any moment: perhaps we run into a friend on the street; perhaps a hat in a window display reminds us of a favorite aunt. Last week a dear friend\u2019s pocketbook-called me, and I listened appreciatively to the announcer on the BART<\/small> while she scooted under San Francisco. I\u2019m in her pocketbook, I thought. Isn\u2019t it wonderful? And I remembered a comment William Maxwell once made about his beloved, and recently departed, Elizabeth Bowen. \u201cMost of all I wish I could have kept her in my pocket,\u201d he wrote Eudora Welty in 1973. \u201cIn the pocket of my plaid bathrobe, where I once kept a kitten.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe doors are closing,\u201d the BART<\/small> announcer boomed. \u201cPlease stand clear of the doors.\u201d And the train whined, and the car rattled\u2014swish-swoosh! swish-swoosh!<\/i>\u2014and in the rhythm of the rails, I sensed an underlying steadiness to our experience, no matter how plagued by accident and strangeness. And I listened until I was cut off.<\/p>\n

Abigail Deutsch is a writer in New York. Her reviews and essays appear in the <\/em>Wall Street Journal, the <\/em>Times Literary Supplement, <\/em>Poetry, and other publications.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My acquaintances rarely call me, but their pockets and purses ring me up faithfully. So it is for the Abigails and Aarons, the Abdullahs and Aaliyahs, A.\u2009A. and AAA\u2014and one mustn\u2019t forget the Yaschas and Yankels, the Xenas and Zinos. We alphabetical extremists, we who crown and conclude your contact lists: we aren\u2019t a call […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":602,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4393],"tags":[11922,11920,11921,11923,224],"class_list":["post-60562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-person","tag-modernity","tag-phones","tag-pocket-dials","tag-privacy","tag-technology"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBad Call: Meditations on the Pocket Dial by Abigail Deutsch<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"September 25, 2013 \u2013 My acquaintances rarely call me, but their pockets and purses ring me up faithfully. 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