My Life with Bob
Page 14
“You didn’t think I’d agree with you on this one, did you?” I asked, relishing what I knew would be surprise and a glimmer of respect. I’d play and push repeat on endless variations of our ensuing discussion. We would debate back and forth over books we disagreed on and issues that had torn us apart. Only now we no longer quarreled so much; our views had mellowed. The rare times we fought, I won.
CHAPTER 15
Autobiography of a Face
On Self-Help
Is there any genre as potentially embarrassing as self-help? Diet books, parenting guides, sex manuals, relationship fix-its; these are the books that hide beneath the New Yorker or within a bathroom magazine rack. Some people consider themselves above the very idea. They disdain any overt effort at self-improvement or consider how-to’s ludicrous. Others, and they have a point, think all books are a form of self-improvement.
For me, the best self-help has always been reading about other people’s problems. From an early age, I lapped up accounts of mental illness and abuse (The Three Faces of Eve, Sybil, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, One Child), other people’s suffering providing my own guilty salve. Reading about other people feeling bad can make you feel a little bad and eventually come around to making you feel good, or at least better. Whatever they’re dealing with always seems legitimately far worse than what one is going through, or at least much more interesting. And it’s an easy way to avoid one’s own problems.
That may explain why, in the summer of 1999 and in the death throes of my marriage, I decided to read a book about other people’s bad marriages. I brought it along as ballast when my husband and I traveled to Texas to witness two of my perfectly happy friends getting perfectly married. The book was Group by Paul Solotaroff, a field guide to the life-lived-less-than-well. Solotaroff had done a kind of gonzo reporting in the psychotherapy world, sitting in on a year of group therapy with the understanding that he would write about it at the end. The result was a riveting account of troubled sex lives, entrenched personal foibles, and pending divorces. It was a book about therapy to be read as therapy.
Shortly after we returned from Texas, three weeks shy of our first anniversary and two days after our wedding pictures finally arrived from the photographer, my husband and I got divorced. I should say we decided to get divorced; in New York at that time, you had to wait a year to finalize the state’s version of a “no-fault” divorce on the charmless grounds of “abandonment.” The morning before Labor Day weekend, my husband initiated what I could not, stuck as I was in the story line of ever after, no matter how unhappily. Within weeks, we’d cut off all communication and put an ocean between us.
Divorce is hard enough when you know that you’re done with a marriage; when you still feel like you’re in the middle of one, it is gut splitting. It was as if my entire existence had rested on a magic carpet rather than a concrete foundation, and it was ripped out from under me. As a married person, I had banked on the idea, however illusory, that I knew the beginning, middle, and end of my—of our—story. If I wasn’t married, then I wasn’t part of the narrative that had gripped me so fully and wholeheartedly from the moment we’d gotten engaged. It knocked the wind out of me. I couldn’t breathe.
When I was nine and packing a suitcase with one of my brothers on the second floor of an A-frame rental in the Catskills, the suitcase shifted, sending me careening backward over a balcony, twelve feet down to the hardwood floor below. I still have a mental image of my feet overhead, hair obstructing my view, and then a whump as I landed and reverberated back up like a ball momentarily drawn by the suction of a vacuum cleaner, the air forced out of my lungs, before I slumped back to the ground and went into shock.
“T-t-tt-t-t-t-t-tt-t-t-t-tt-t,” I jabbered mechanically for a long minute (this part I don’t remember) while my brothers giggled nervously. As soon as I regained consciousness, everyone was herded into the car home. I was given the front seat for the first time, rather than the Way Back, where I’d usually hang my head in misery under a cloud of stale Salem smoke and car exhaust. But I couldn’t even appreciate this first-class status; I leaned my stinging head against the window, consumed with shame. I had fallen like an idiot in front of everyone, made a ridiculous noise, and now we had to leave early, ruining the weekend for everybody. A bowl rested in my lap in case I threw up, an urge I suppressed with all my might, determined not to make things worse.
This was exactly how I felt now. Once again, I had failed spectacularly for all to see. I’d summoned my family members, all my friends—the Mathieus had flown in from France, for goodness sake—everyone I knew and loved and wanted to think well of me to my wedding barely a year earlier, and now I’d ruined it, wasting everyone’s time and money, and losing their respect in the process. Everyone had been let down.
I had always known that one day I was going to get in trouble and now I had; the only benefit I could think of—and I didn’t think of it until later, when I’d recovered enough to start thinking again—was that I would never let it happen again. Not that I wouldn’t get in trouble again; I knew I would. But I would never let myself be caught so off guard. The mistake had been thinking I was somehow above fucking up royally, that I was safe. But I had been just as vulnerable and oblivious as anyone else, and reading all the books in the world couldn’t have saved me.
And I was pretty sure nobody would let me forget it. It’s terrible to feel cast out of the smug married club, the group that could show up at the ten-year college reunion with all their boxes ticked off, cheerful toddlers scampering underfoot. Now I would be a blight, a cautionary tale. There might not be any other divorcées there. Everything that married people knew—whom they lived with, what their plans were next weekend and next year, what they wanted out of life—I suddenly didn’t know anymore. The baby names we’d picked out, for naught. My two former cats, living with a stranger. Our plans to retire in Bali. The stories we’d share with our grandchildren. My entire sense of the long-term was gone.
The day-to-day was no easier. The first instinct was to call my ex-husband for comfort, to tell him how hard it was to get from morning to night and then through those long nighttime hours. But on whom do you unload your pain when the person you unload it on is no longer there and, worse, is the person who inflicted it? Talking to other people wasn’t much easier. “I had no idea!” was the common response. Or: “You never know what goes on in a marriage.” Even when it’s your own.
Whatever other people said to me, no matter their intention, felt less a consolation and more like judgment. Not only was my ex being judged, but the wisdom of the marriage itself, the quality of the person going into it and staying there, the implications, me. If he was so awful, why did I marry him? If there were such problems, how could I not have known? What the hell was wrong with me? The author of a bad story, one with a no-good, fool heroine and an ugly ending.
And it was hard to get out. The marriage didn’t last long, but I hadn’t known that would be the case when it began. Everything had been planned with an eye to forever. In the early, heady days of romance, I’d given my husband unprecedented access to Bob. He’d loved my Book of Books so much he’d asked if it could be his as well. I’d let him fill his own completed books into Bob’s pages, starting from the back and working forward, toward mine, becoming part of my diary and as much a part of me as anyone ever had. At some point, perhaps in our dotage, we imagined our two book lists would meet at Bob’s center.
When we split up, I ripped out those pages and gave them back. (He asked.) I’d been so careful, so self-protective, for so long. I should never have let someone else write in my Book of Books. I swore never to break Bob again. For now, I put him aside, the damaged record too painful to revisit.
Because the marriage ended inconveniently on a three-day weekend, a shift in plans was required; the scheduled visit to the in-laws clearly no longer in the cards. Somehow, my weepy body was relocated upstate to my father’s house in Woodstock. Was it the second night
after my husband put an end to things? The third? There was one night in Brooklyn, wailing in despair, inconsolable; the rest was a blur.
Upstate, one of my brothers and his girlfriend drove me to a mall where they installed me at the movie In Providence; I think it was supposed to be a comedy. I stared at the screen, sobbing. At that moment every story was a tragedy.
Too mired in my own sorrows to get interested in anyone else’s, for the first time I was unable to read. Bob lay forlornly, untouched, on a shelf; I had no desire to reflect or reminisce. There was nothing good to be found in it. Every book I opened, no matter how comedic or superficial, came back to me and my failure. There was no escape reading. The morning headlines, Enid Nemy’s “Metropolitan Diary” in the Times, a breezy Vanity Fair article about a long-forgotten Las Vegas scandal, it didn’t matter what—in a miracle of thematic unity, everything managed to be about my heartbreak, every story thread getting tangled in the shreds of my unraveling life. People say that divorce is like a death and, insofar as I felt like part of me had died along with my marriage, they were right.
The week after we split, my ex and I met in our forsaken apartment to divvy up belongings, parceling out furniture and taking turns claiming the antiques we’d splurged on during our honeymoon in Bali and Chiang Mai only eleven months earlier. We hadn’t been together long, but we’d accumulated a lot—the year in London, the visits to France, six weeks in Greece and Turkey; there were carpets.
Hardest to parse were the books. It was easy enough to distinguish his monumental hardcover tomes from my used college paperbacks. We knew which books had come from his personal library or mine. But what of the books we’d acquired together? Mutual dreams were bound together in so many of those pages.
“You can have Joseph and His Brothers,” I offered. We’d both planned to be Thomas Mann completists and had gotten an especially attractive early edition to share.
“Thank you,” he said. I’m not sure he realized that with that I was giving him Us. We had plotted wanting to read it together and he had given it to me as a gift. In returning it, I was saying farewell to any together plans.
Somehow I got us out of our Brooklyn lease, left the starter apartment that had overnight become a morgue, and moved to a sad divorcée’s one-bedroom next to the Morgan Library. Though not properly a public library, it felt close enough. A start on a new page.
I was finally forced back into reading when, in one of life’s great ironic twists, I was asked to write my very first book review, and the book was Susan Faludi’s Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. I almost felt ready to write it. At the moment I was feeling very much betrayed by the American man.
“Oh, dear,” my editor said when I handed my piece in. “Let me show you how to write a book review.” I did have one nice turn of phrase, which he kindly kept.
Meanwhile, a new books editor had joined the Economist, and when I tearfully explained that I might need an extra week to finish my monthly column, she got me on a plane to London, put me up in a hotel on the Thames, and asked me to work on an editorial project involving the magazine’s cultural coverage. I was back in a city that had been ours, but it wasn’t the same place it had been just a year before. I steered clear of our old neighborhood, trying to sear a new imprint on the city so it wouldn’t become a place defined by past disappointment. I didn’t want to lose London. This would become a pattern—getting back up on the bike and revisiting the places he and I had been to, trying to reclaim them. He couldn’t have London, or Paris, or Amsterdam. These were the settings of my story too.
When I finally found my way back to leisure reading, it was to read the dark, sad memoirs of darker, sadder people, any heartbreak more worthy than my own. I read Calvin Trillin’s Remembering Denny, his affecting tribute to a college classmate who had committed suicide. I read Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which the former editor of French Elle dictated using a single blinking eye after a car accident left him with locked-in syndrome, unable to move or communicate in any other way. Misery memoirs made good company.
In my wallowing, I leaned on other people’s resilience. I read Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father by Richard Rodriguez. I read the transgender travel writer Jan Morris’s second memoir, Pleasures of a Tangled Life. I read Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language by Eva Hoffman. I envied other people’s hardiness.
But no matter how hard I tried to dive into other people’s stories, it felt impossible not to get mired in my own, which rattled in my head like a taunting earworm. No matter how many times I tearfully recounted my unhappiness to friends, trying to get it out, it stayed on, preoccupying by day and haunting by night. Maybe I could somehow write it out of me. If I could just get it on paper, I could crumple it up, burn it, throw it away, and get rid of it.
So I enrolled in a personal essay class at the New School. I’d never taken a writing class before because I’d always believed reading was what taught one how to write—but that’s not why I was there. The teacher I chose was Lucy Grealy, who had just written an acclaimed memoir, Autobiography of a Face. A poet and essayist, Grealy had had cancer of the jaw as a child, and a torturous course of surgeries had dramatically reshaped her lovely born appearance. Until you got used to her, you could feel the residual pain, but over time she became beautiful. She had earned that face. And she ultimately helped me out of my myopic despair. She was one of the least sappy or sentimental people I’d ever met, and I was in awe of her.
Grealy’s physical condition could have provided a ready excuse for any difficulty. “This singularity of meaning—I was my face, I was ugliness—though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape,” she wrote in her memoir. “It became the launching pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked what was wrong with my life. Everything led to it, everything receded from it—my face as personal vanishing point.”
Like Grealy, I felt as if my “ugliness”—my divorce—was forcibly made visible to the rest of the world, like a scarlet D tattooed on my forehead, an affront. It felt unseemly to wear my brokenheartedness like a rebuke to other people’s joy. Yet Grealy had found a way to transform her vulnerability into a source of power, turning her “ugliness” into a deeply felt work of art. I wasn’t aiming anywhere that high. I just wanted the sense of exposure to disappear, to not feel like I was displaying my hurt all the time, to not allow it to define me.
The anonymity of Grealy’s class was like a blanket. None of the students were professional writers. I introduced myself as a media executive at Turner Broadcasting, which, alas, I was, still finding it hard to move from marketing into pure editorial work, even as I continued to write for the Economist at night. A number of the students were retirees who wanted to unload what they’d learned or waited a lifetime to say, and they had little to lose. Nor did I. I didn’t need to worry about what any of them thought of me or my writing. I didn’t even bother to try to write well; I certainly didn’t intend to publish what I wrote there, which was a torrent of raw anger and regret and sorrow—everything that had been left unsaid. I wasn’t looking for readers and I absolutely did not want exposure. This was about release.
But shortly after taking the class, I decided to write about divorce again—in a very different way, and this time with a definite eye to readers. I’d recently met another woman my age who was divorced, and our bond was immediate. Listening to this new friend describe her experience, I no longer felt so alone. Soon, other divorced people in their twenties materialized where I hadn’t noticed them before, and I began to seek them out. What did they know that I didn’t know? What had they learned? If I could make sense of what happened to them, perhaps my own story would begin to make sense. And by writing about divorce from this broader perspective, telling other people’s divorce stories, I could reach those going through the same dreadful experience. Maybe I could be their self-help. In the process, I became my own.
Right after handing in my manuscript at the end of the year 2000, I hopped on a plane to Sicily, where I cycled around the island on a group tour that consisted of four happily vacationing couples and me. On the last day of our bike trip, after three weeks of avoiding all contact with the outside world, I checked e-mail at an Internet café in Taormina. A lawyerly missive informed me that the divorce had finally gone through. It was official.
My life and Bob had been torn apart at the seams. I had swiftly fallen from the Austenian security of destined couple to the Whartonian disgrace of divorcée. But my Book of Books was still potent and full of promise, with only twenty-five of its hundred pages filled in. The binding held fast, despite the visible tears in the back. The pages I had written in before my marriage were unerasable, and the ones written in since were still part of my story. I had lots of blank pages left to go, and they were mine.
CHAPTER 16
Flashman
I Do Not Like Your Books
It’s no secret that we judge other people by their books. This isn’t a matter of snobbery—at least not always—but of taste and affinity and sensibility. Frankly, someone who reads only Middle English poetry and literature in translation would probably put me off as much as someone whose tastes run exclusively to westerns or historical romance. What someone reads gives you a sense of who they are. If you really don’t like someone’s books, chances are you probably won’t like them either.