Chicago

Chicago is the novel’s lived geography and a counterweight to its fractured chronology. Henry and Clare meet, work, make a home, and return to familiar streets at different points in their lives; the city’s rooms, institutions, parks, and lakefront make their changing relationship tangible even when time refuses to stay in sequence.

A city encountered through separate presents

On October 26, 1991, twenty-year-old Clare enters the Newberry Library for the first time, carrying an art-history research project on the Kelmscott Press. She passes the dark entrance, takes the elevator to the third floor, applies for a Reader’s Card, and climbs to Special Collections, where the morning light falls through tall windows onto tables heaped with books. The place is at once a working research library and, to Clare, a box of beautiful books. When a staff member directs her to Henry DeTamble, the city’s institutional interior becomes the site of their first meeting in Henry’s present: Clare recognizes the man she has known for years, while he sees a stranger who seems to know him intimately.

The same encounter looks entirely different from Henry’s side. He is twenty-eight, tired after a sleepless night and an argument with Ingrid Carmichel, and at work in a small, windowless, humidity-controlled room on the Newberry’s fourth floor, cataloging donated marbled papers. Bored and in need of coffee, he walks out through the office and Reading Room; a passing exchange at the desk brings him face to face with Clare. His ordinary workday is interrupted by the unsettling discovery that she knows him, though he cannot identify her. The contrast between the library’s ordered tasks and their unequal knowledge makes Chicago a setting for temporal dislocation, not merely a backdrop to it.

Clare’s first visit also sets the city in motion beyond the library. After Henry agrees to meet her that evening, she forgets the Kelmscott research, hurries down the marble stairs, crosses the park, and runs into the October sunshine, jubilant. At dinner, the two begin to exchange the pieces of each other’s lives that their mismatched timelines have withheld. Henry tells her that his mother, Annette Lyn Robinson, was a singer and that his father, Richard DeTamble, is a violinist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; after his mother’s death, he says, his father was left treading water. A meeting in Special Collections opens into a relationship whose knowledge of the city and of each other will always be uneven.

Work, streets, and recurring routes

The Newberry remains part of Henry’s everyday life as well as a place where the couple’s chronology intersects. On another workday, he is shelving books and speaking with Gomez when he suddenly disappears and returns naked in the stacks. After he dresses and steps back through the security door, the Reading Room appears unchanged: a colleague instructs a patron, another waves, and the clock shows 4:15. He has been absent for less than fifteen minutes. The unchanged workplace sharpens the difference between the disruption Henry experiences and the routine that continues around him.

The city also has a more private, habitual scale. In 1994, newly married, Clare and Henry live in a two-bedroom apartment in a Ravenswood two-flat, with butter-colored hardwood floors, antique cabinets, and appliances they describe as antiquated. Domestic life takes shape through ordinary negotiations: Henry cooks, Clare handles the laundry, and they hire a cleaning service because neither wants to vacuum. Henry works Tuesday through Saturday at the Newberry, takes the El after breakfast, and leaves Clare to return to bed for another hour. The marriage is established not only through declarations but through repeated routes, shared chores, and the particular irritations and compromises of a household.

Chicago’s streets can also offer Henry a temporary sense of freedom from domestic strain. After leaving home upset, he drives north through empty streets, past Rosehill Cemetery and car dealerships, with Coltrane playing on the radio. He continues through Evanston to the lake, parks by the lagoon, and walks out onto the pier, looking back along the shoreline toward Chicago beneath an orange-and-purple sky. The drive calms him through its repeated stoplights and streetlights, but it begins as an impulsive escape from Clare and ends at a recognizable edge of the city. This landscape gives a private emotional crisis a physical route without resolving it for him.

Home, family, and the city’s outskirts

In July 1994, the couple move from their apartment into a house after a long day of moving. Their belongings make the scale of the transition plain: Clare’s heavy Victorian furniture and Henry’s seventy-eight boxes of books have exhausted the movers. That night the rooms are still empty of furniture, the windows bare, and streetlight enters through dusty glass. Clare and Henry touch the cherry windowsills, test the claw-footed bathtub and the heavy Universal stove, and move from room to room. The house becomes theirs through this first exploration; Henry understands it as home while they lie together on the bare floor among the boxes.

Chicago is not confined to the couple’s household or Henry’s workplace. In May 2000, Henry encounters Clare outside George’s vintage clothing store in Andersonville, where she is looking at baby clothes. Her stillness at the shop window makes her longing visible before they speak. Their meeting occurs in a neighborhood of small tables, coffee, restaurants, dogs, and Swedish knickknack shops: an everyday street scene that also exposes a private hope. In another part of the city, Clare later brings Henry through Pilsen to a dinner arranged for his birthday in a run-down two-flat. The apartment has been transformed into a one-table restaurant, its candlelit dining room set with china and damask while birds fill cages in the living room. The city’s neighborhoods become distinct social spaces for encounters, friendship, and family rather than interchangeable scenery.

Family life also draws the couple out toward Brookfield Zoo, where they spend a day with Gomez, Charisse, and their children. The children visit monkeys, flamingoes, polar bears, and otters; Alba likes the big cats best. The adults walk together in the sun, talking, while the children play. Afterward, Clare’s birthday surprise brings Henry back into a small Pilsen apartment for a dinner organized with people close to the family. The route across the city connects a public day out with an intimate gathering, placing Alba’s childhood and the couple’s friendships within the same urban world.

Public memory and the lakefront

The city’s public spaces can feel crowded, but they can also become places of solitude. On Christmas Eve in 1988, Henry spends the day alone after his father makes a half-hearted invitation and Ingrid reminds him that other people have family obligations. With Mrs. Kim away in Korea and friends unavailable, he buys schnapps, takes the El downtown, and goes to Grant Park. He skates around the rink, then walks past the Art Institute and its wreath-decked lions toward Buckingham Fountain. There, as evening deepens over the lake, he watches gulls fighting over a discarded loaf of bread. The city’s seasonal rituals continue around his isolation, giving him movement and company only in the form of strangers, birds, and familiar streets.

Henry’s routes across Chicago also recur in moments when his time travel puts others at risk. In the extreme cold, Clare wakes Alba, gathers Henry’s clothes and boots into a shopping bag, and drives toward the Monroe Street Parking Garage, where Henry says he has appeared without clothes. They move quickly through the blue-and-orange winter dawn along Lake Shore Drive. Clare experiences the journey as uncannily familiar, but when she reaches the northwest end of the garage, the pay-phone receiver is hanging from its cord and Henry is gone. The city’s roads provide the means to reach him, yet cannot guarantee that he will still be there when they arrive.

At the Chicago Cultural Center, the city gathers around Clare’s work. Her exhibition fills the high-ceilinged space with bird skeletons made from wire, translucent paper, and shellac; an eight-foot pigeon dominates the entrance, and motorized sculptures beat their wings while two mechanical cocks slowly demolish each other in a corner. Friends and Clare’s family have traveled in from Michigan, and visitors crowd around the pieces after a favorable review in the Tribune. The public celebration registers both the reach of Clare’s art and its physical cost: she is exhausted and thin, though she appears ecstatic at the opening. Chicago provides an audience for her work while the people closest to her see what the achievement has taken.

The city as a structure of return

Henry’s time travel repeatedly places him in Chicago at different ages and in different versions of the present. As a child, he first confronts the shock of displacement in the Field Museum; as an adult, he returns to the city’s museums and streets through episodes he cannot control. At the Art Institute, he even encounters his nine-year-old self and turns a visit into a lesson in pickpocketing, explaining that the child needs to know how to steal in order to survive. The city’s cultural landmarks therefore hold more than memories: they become meeting points between versions of Henry who are separated by decades but occupy the same urban map.

That map does not make the couple’s time lines identical. Clare can be waiting in one part of Chicago while Henry is absent from his own present, or Henry can arrive at a familiar destination from a different year and find that the scene has already changed. Repeated routes—the El to downtown, the road north to the lake, the walk from work, the trip to the garage—give the reader coordinates for a story whose chronology continually shifts. The city offers continuity in streets and buildings, but not in access to the people who move through them.

The novel’s Chicago is consequently both a home and a record of separation. Its domestic rooms hold a marriage’s routines, its institutions frame work and encounter, and its public landscapes absorb solitude, celebration, and danger. Even the lakefront can become an edge from which Henry looks back toward the city, or a route along which Clare searches for him. Chicago cannot stabilize time, but its recurring places make the costs of temporal absence legible: the same streets remain, while the people loved within them may not be present together.