The Hours

Clarissa exits the florist’s, feeling that her departure confines Barbara to the past while she persists into the present. On her way to Richard’s apartment, she stops where a small crowd has congregated outside the celebrity’s trailer, waiting to catch a glimpse of the celebrity. Waiting, like the other people, for 10 minutes embarrasses Clarissa. As she waits, she ponders morality; far into the future, time will have rendered the edgy teenagers in front of her to anonymous bones, while the movie star will live on in public memory. Clarissa feels attracted to the immortality fame confers.

Richard’s neighborhood, once a bohemian petri dish of novel possibilities, is now an airbrushed facsimile of its former self. Clarissa recalls Richard as he was in the old neighborhood, teenaged and graceful; she recalls standing with him, on the very corner on which she’s standing now, fighting over their future after their summer romance. She wanted freedom and was skeptical of his desire for her, wondering how he could prefer her sexless body to his lover Louis’ carnal, statuesque form. The fight seemed unremarkable at the time but now seems like a decisive turning point in their relationship.

The lobby of Richard’s building reminds Clarissa how perfectly it exemplifies squalor: “[The lobby] surprises her in almost the way a rare and remarkable object, a work of art, can continue to surprise; simply because it remains, throughout time, so purely and utterly itself” (63). Amidst the squalor, the original marble wainscoting commemorates a lost grandeur when the building was filled with dignified people who had hopes for the future. Clarissa is relieved the elevator isn’t working: The small, fluorescent space with the dreaded mirror makes her feel trapped. She prefers the freedom of the stairs.

Richard greets her as “Mrs. D,” making Clarissa wonder why he hasn’t retired the nickname. His two-room, dimly lit apartment makes her feel she’s entered an underwater space separate from the surrounding building. She finds Richard seated in his favorite, rotting chair, wrapped in an astronaut-themed children’s robe that renders him at once foolish and regal.

When Clarissa lets in daylight by opening a shade, Richard shuns it. He frequently suffers headaches and hears awesome voices: “I think of [the voices] as coalescences of black fire, I mean they’re dark and bright at the same time. There was one that looked a bit like a black, electrified jellyfish. They were singing, just now in [...] Greek. Archaic Greek” (70). Richard thinks Clarissa’s party has already happened, and he struggles to remember what he’s done for the past day. AIDS-related illness is affecting his cognition. He shows genuine disinterest in the movie star Clarissa saw. Clarissa attributes his disinterest in celebrity to his genius and ego: Richard is convinced there is no more interesting world than his, no more interesting people than his friends. Instead of belittling people like a typical egotist, however, Richard inflates those around him to a fictional grandiosity. Some dislike being made a character in Richard’s world, but Clarissa enjoys the idealized version of herself he projects.

Richard doesn’t want to attend the party, confessing he thinks he’s failed in his poetry and that the judges have only awarded him the prize because of his tragic fate. He confides in Clarissa something he’s never told anyone: He secretly thought he was a genius. He thinks this pride caused his downfall—the vastness and relentlessness of life overwhelmed his ambition, his confidence, himself. He says his only true regret is not having written about the life he and Clarissa might have led together. Clarissa realizes that even in a relationship, they could’ve accommodated their attraction to others. When Richard kisses her goodbye, she avoids his lips for fear of giving him a cold.