My Life with Bob

by Pamela Paul

  Here’s my personal test case: The Fountainhead. I have a hard time liking someone who loves it. Maybe if you admire Ayn Rand’s philosophy and her politics but admit the book is terribly written. Or if you hate Ayn Rand’s politics but helplessly fell for the story, or it piqued your interest in architecture at an impressionable moment. But if The Fountainhead is one of your top five books ever, if you think it a magnificent opus of our times, a book every president—every citizen, at least those who matter!—should read, then you will probably not be my best friend.

  And people judge me by my own books, for better and for worse. I once had to grit my teeth at a dinner as one person remarked, “You can always tell conservatives by the Paul Johnson on their shelves,” because really, what else could those Paul Johnsons tell you? That you bought one by accident? That you’d read it out of curiosity? That it wasn’t yours but was your husband’s and now was your ex-husband’s and somehow got left behind? That you might not always agree with everything you read, and isn’t that part of the point of reading, anyway? We can misjudge each other by our book titles, too.

  I certainly wouldn’t want to be judged by The Fountainhead, which shows up in Bob, but which I read in a state of complete ignorance as bonus material for a class on twentieth-century architecture; I knew nothing of Rand or of objectivism. I even unwittingly showed it off to my French father, Bertrand, an architect but also a socialist, thinking he’d be impressed when I brought it to France to read over vacation.

  “How could you bring that piece of shit into our house?” he asked in disgust.

  “But it’s about architecture,” I replied weakly. Or was it? Within pages, I was suffering at the hands of its tyrannical main character, Howard Roark, forever plunging a fist into soil and holding forth. The lead female character, Dominique, a woman who naturally took second place to the godlike Roark, kept striding across rooms in long, columnlike gowns. Who knew why this nonsense had even been mentioned in a class about architecture, never mind how it could have sold millions of copies. I trodded on.

  A hundred pages later, I was completely with Bertrand, finishing the damned thing only out of spite. I hate-read every last horrible page of The Fountainhead alternating between fury and despair. When it was finally over, I willfully erased it from memory, only the vague echo of Dominique, stomping around in her evening gowns, stubbornly remaining. The book went directly into the trash, where it would never hurt anyone again. Some books are just not good.

  Flashman is one of those books, and had I known that, I could have saved myself a lot of time and romantic trouble. If only it had carried a warning sign: anyone who really likes this book isn’t the guy for you. As soon as I read my new boyfriend Abe’s copy, early in our relationship, I should have realized we were doomed. But I was in denial. After a period of gloomy postdivorce abstinence, I’d begun dating again, sorrowfully at first, and then, a few briskly aborted relationships later, with gusto. Having already met and parted ways with the One, I was eager to meet the Next One.

  Abe could be it. He was ridiculously handsome and well educated and appealing. Mostly he was handsome, and I was attracted to him in a way that felt slightly unwholesome from the moment I stole him from one of my friends. To be fair, she was more a colleague than a friend (or does that make it less fair?). To be fairer, they had broken up months earlier, and she said she was “totally over it.” She even had a new boyfriend. (She never spoke to me again.)

  I already felt guilty because my interest in Abe dated to the time when the two of them were still going strong. Whenever I’d been their third wheel, I would eye him covetously, persuaded that he was surreptitiously eyeing me, too. Generally, when I have this kind of fantasy, it’s precisely that—a fantasy. I’ll think someone is looking at me with flirtatious intent and meanwhile he’s thinking something like You look like my aunt Sylvie or Do you always play with your hair? But for once, with Abe, the wishful thinking was real. Several months after he and my friend/colleague broke up, he called. “I’ve wanted to do this for a long time,” he said.

  With a PhD and a law degree and I’m pretty sure one other random master’s, he was about six times better educated than I was. He basically had a graduate degree for every time I had even momentarily pondered and rejected the idea of going to grad school. Surely he knew good things to read, I thought. In retrospect, those multiple academic credentials should have caused some alarm.

  Abe had lots of books about philosophy and law and taxes and scuba diving and outdoor camping cookery. For fiction, he liked the kind of masculine books I think of as naughty-upper-class-Brit lit, the type of novels typically described as “ribald” and “infamous” and “jolly good fun.” George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman Papers series is also, let it be noted, a favorite of British bad boys Boris Johnson and Jeffrey Archer.

  But I picked up his copy of the first Flashman in good spirit, wanting to like what my new boyfriend liked. I had already read one book by Fraser (not part of the cultish Flashman Papers), a yellowed paperback languishing in a guesthouse in western China. For several days it had been my sole reading companion, and this had robbed me of any desire to pick up another Fraser until I met Abe. Still, I needed to believe in second chances.

  Flashman came with us to Belize, where Abe was initiating me into another of his preferred leisure activities, deep-sea diving. Given my troubled relationship with sports (my college application essay had been about my struggle with gym), this did not bode well. But I had fallen into that deceptive If you love this then I must love this because I might love you thinking. I would like Abe’s books and his sports, because that’s the kind of game, good sport gal I was. I had never even thought about scuba diving before, so at least I wasn’t bad at it.

  But scuba diving, I soon learned, is dangerous—as in, life threatening. Typically, the sharks and the boats and the storms and the poisonous eels aren’t what kill you. It’s your own body that does you in. The premise of scuba-diving education is that the more you read about it, the more you understand what can go wrong, the more likely you are to avoid making fatal errors underwater.

  This was not my process. The more I read about scuba diving, the more frightened I got. According to the manual, you could dive too deep and too long, accumulate too much nitrogen in your body and come down with a case of nitrogen narcosis, like inhaling a megadose of laughing gas at the dentist, but not funny. You could lose your capacity for judgment and swim off oblivious into the deep sea forever. Then there was oxygen toxicity, “the bends”—just about the worst name ever given to a sports affliction with the possible exception of cauliflower ear. You could vomit underwater and you could vomit above water. You could vomit into your regulator (the device you breathe through) or your regulator could break altogether. You could bid farewell to your middle ear.

  Other things could go wrong, and I contemplated all of them. If something terrible happens undersea and you panic like a normal person, you can’t flee like a normal person. Instead, you have to rise methodically through the water at regular intervals (requiring math) to prevent nitrogen from proliferating in your bloodstream. Worst outcome? Death.

  I tried to focus on wowing Abe with my athletic derring-do and how much I was going to love scuba diving if I didn’t die. When I suppressed all of my natural anxieties and fine-tuned fears, I did end up loving it. At forty feet below, you can viscerally appreciate that the earth’s topography doesn’t stop at the water’s edge, but continues and even amplifies below the surface. Mountains, canyons, grooved crevasses, and tunnels open before you. Schools of fish envelop you in their shimmery cumulative mass. Moray eels bray silently from within their coral cocoons, their massive jaws forming silent O’s. Here is your access to a private H. G. Wellsian fantasia of half-impossible creatures.

  I was fine! I didn’t vomit. I didn’t even feel like vomiting. It was hard to understand why anyone would vomit until about four days into our vacation, when someone else on our boat felt like vomiting and p
roceeded to do so violently and determinedly all over the boat floor and into the surrounding ocean as we hurtled toward that morning’s destination. Nausea, of course, has a social element, which is one of many reasons no one likes to watch someone else throw up. You sympathize and then you empathize and then you join in.

  This is nauseating? I remember thinking for a split second, watching the hapless passenger spew at my feet. My next thought was, This is nauseating. When we arrived at our diving destination, it felt insane to sink five feet below the surface to wait things out as you’re supposed to (bobbing on the wavy surface, being, of course, nauseating). Everything in my consciousness fought against it. This is unnatural! And that was the end of my scuba-diving career. Spooked, I didn’t want to dive anymore, and Abe couldn’t understand why not. He had zero empathy.

  So he kept diving, and I took up the lesser “sport” of snorkeling. When I retired my regulator, I could feel Abe’s disappointment, his realization that I wasn’t that sporty girl after all but was instead the flimsy, hypochondriacal kind of girl, one who’d imagined herself getting dengue fever on at least two previous occasions and had a persistent and abiding terror of falling down the stairs.

  Abe couldn’t assuage my fear because he couldn’t understand it, and he most certainly couldn’t empathize. In his mind, having weighed the risks and undertaken the precautions, scuba diving was an irrefutably safe endeavor. Those were the facts, and my irrational emotions flew in the face of them, disrupting his order. None of the other women he had dated had been afraid. Diving was meant to be a mutual pleasure, and I wasn’t living up to expectations. He judged me, and he found me wanting.

  I, in return, could say that I did not like pursuits of the person I was on vacation with. Because in addition to scuba diving, there was Flashman.

  Yes, it’s true. If we all liked the same books, we’d all boringly be the same people. That said, certain books can rightfully be considered deal breakers. In an essay in the New York Times Book Review, Rachel Donadio called this the Pushkin problem: “When a missed—or misguided—literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast.” Not everyone can fall for a die-hard fan of Nicholas Sparks or a James Joyce completist.

  Flashman is decidedly a cult novel, which didn’t bode well. For whatever reason, when it comes to cult fiction, I’m never part of the cult. Beloved in the same way clubby Wodehouse is beloved but by fewer people, Flashman, published in 1969, is the first in a series whose subsequent titles each felt like a slap in the face (e.g., Flashman and the Redskins, Flashman’s Lady). The cover of Flashman Volume I featured a swaggering bloke in uniform with a bare-breasted maiden of “exotic” background, in, of course, the background. Sometimes you can tell a book by its cover.

  Here’s what Abe loved so much: the title character, Harry Paget Flashman, a faux historical Zelig-like figure, romps across the British Empire, landing variously in Scotland, India, and Afghanistan. Sprinkled throughout are minor figures from British history—Lord Auckland, governor-general of India for a spell; Paolo di Avitabile, a governor of Peshawar province; Thomas Arnold, headmaster at the Rugby School; and the like. But the main draw is its rogue protagonist, a light dragoon and a womanizing drunkard who skips from duel to romp to “forceful seduction.” Most of the time, he frequents prostitutes, but he also enjoys raping an Afghan dancing girl. I have nothing against a good antihero, but I didn’t even enjoy hating this guy. I just wanted to get away from him.

  There can certainly be pleasure in hate reading. As with The Fountainhead, I have hated my way through several books to the last page, not always out of generosity to the writer. It’s a force of will. You will be read no matter how hard you make it. Some say reading hateful books feels like time wasted—and with so little time, so many books, why bother with the bad? But there’s something bracing about reading a book you despise, because loathing is usually mixed with other emotions—fear, perverse attraction, even occasional, complicated strains of sympathy. It’s one of many reasons I believe in negative reviews. It can be interesting when a book provokes animosity. But hate in and of itself is not a very interesting response to a book, and, oh, how I hated Flashman.

  My distaste didn’t ruffle Abe in the least. Sure, it was a failing on my part, but for the most part he didn’t care. This sanguinity in the face of my displeasure seemed to imply a kind of passivity or, more distressingly, an absence of passion. In the course of our relationship, I discovered William Dean Howells and read him voraciously; Abe had no interest. I read George Eliot’s Adam Bede (no interest) and Cathi Hanauer’s anthology The Bitch in the House (need I even say).

  The absence of mutual engagement felt like a loss. Reading together is a way to bond. It’s nice when people like the books you like. There’s even a joy in finding someone else who hates the same book as much as you do. There were books I longed to discuss and dissect and even debate, books I would have argued about with my ex-husband in a pattern I found reassuring and rewarding. But Abe had no truck with me on any of them. When I thought about it, he didn’t really engage with me as a person at all; I was merely a foil. We were not on the same page.

  And so I broke up with him. I decided to mark the rupture with a long solo road trip from the Grand Canyon, through the national parks of Utah, over to Las Vegas, where I’d never been, and then to California, where I’d follow the Pacific Coast Highway from Los Angeles to my brother Roger’s apartment in San Francisco. I would clear my head and get back to what I wanted to do. I would read whatever I wanted at night and listen in the car to whatever books I wanted by day, and make up my own company without someone else’s indifference simmering in the background. I may have had no one to talk to about any of it, but at least I had no one to make me feel bad about having no one to talk to. Four years after my divorce, I was okay with that.

  Yet the breakup seemed to arouse an unfamiliar passion in Abe, who protested the entire plan. “The trip will be much better if I come along,” he insisted. He’d been to the Grand Canyon and knew how to see it. He knew the national parks. He’d bring his lightweight camping equipment and would cook gourmet meals over a Bunsen burner. He got very excited about how lightly you could camp and how well you could eat while doing so. This was another of his favorite things, and another of his favorite things that left me cold. But Abe was adamant. We should get back together and this trip would show why.

  So Abe came. I regretted caving almost immediately; his lack of interest in everything from the audiobooks to the scenery to me sapped energy out of the entire endeavor. He sighed lightly as I popped in an audiobook of Edmund Morris’s controversial biography of Ronald Reagan, Dutch, wanting to hear firsthand Morris’s lightly fictionalized account, in which he, the biographer, created a stand-in character to represent himself. Had it really been a terrible decision? Discuss.

  Abe had no opinion. He didn’t want to talk about the book or about Morris or about the biographer’s responsibility or the opaqueness of Ronald Reagan. Nor did Abe talk about the cacti, the Painted Desert, the monumental stone edifices of Zion National Park. Everything got swallowed up in his apathy. By the time we got to California, I was doubly sure we were over.

  In San Francisco, I saw my closest friend from college, Victoria. Vic was my most sensible friend—down-to-earth, loyal, zero tolerance for pretension or condescension. She’d been one of the few people I’d known in college who wasn’t afraid to call out other people on their bullshit. That night, I pulled her aside to ask her a burning question. Vic had been on the swim team in college; she was not afraid of the water.

  “Have you ever gone scuba diving?” I asked.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” she said. “I would never. It’s extremely dangerous for one thing and, besides that, it’s terrifying.” Sure, go and swim across a pool or a lake, lovely; but swimming while under thousands of tons of water was nuts. If I had only known of Vic’s claustrophobic aversion, I wouldn’t have felt like such an outlier in
Belize, such a terrible disappointment. Here was a college swim team champion, and she wanted nothing to do with scuba diving either, dammit.

  But it was too late now, and oddly irrelevant. There was no longer any issue between Abe and me, not about scuba diving, not about Flashman, not about lightweight camping, not about us. There was no parting of the minds because there had never been a meeting of the minds, nor of the heart. Like a reader and character completely out of sync, we had zero empathy for each other. When we went our separate ways, both my heart and my Book of Books remained blessedly intact.

  CHAPTER 17

  The Master and Margarita

  Recommendations

  “You should read this book” almost never simply means you should read this book. It is usually far more fraught. Telling someone what to read, even asking politely, can feel more like an entreaty or an implied judgment or a there’s-something-you-should-know than a straightforward proposal. If you read this book, then you love me. If you read this book, then you respect my opinions. If you read this book, you will understand what it is I need you to understand and can’t explain to you myself.

  What might be about shared enthusiasm and appreciation can even weirdly become a kind of threat. If you read this book, then you’d know better. If you’re smart, you’ll read this. Or you have to be smart to read this, and you’re a fool if you don’t. Everyone else is reading this. Everyone else already has.

  There’s good reason to take book recommendations personally, even when they have more to do with the person doing the recommending than with the person on the receiving end of the suggestion. With my brother Roger, for example, book recommendations were imperatives that one needed to heed, and I wasn’t sure I’d be his sister anymore if I didn’t listen.