My Life with Bob

by Pamela Paul

  Roger had trained me to follow his lead early on. When we were little, he lorded over our younger brother Brian and me, and whenever we violated one of his codes, his right index finger would shoot high into the air in a brutal display of power.

  “Suspennnnsion!” he’d announce, drawing out the second syllable as if to savor our anguish.

  “What’s the suspension? What’s the suspension?” Brian and I would babble, frantic.

  “One week, no Atari,” Roger would say with cool matter-of-factness, as if he’d just consulted the rule book. “One week, no Monster Manual.” “No comic books.” And later, O bitterness: “No Apple II Plus.” Whatever we had done wrong, we had to be punished. Taking out the garbage for a few days might get us out of it, but that was scary—it was dark, and there were raccoons.

  As he got older, Roger’s laws transitioned from not letting me touch any of his books to foisting his books upon me. If I didn’t follow his bidding, there would be trouble. One weekend, we had to go to a bar mitzvah in Colorado. “Read this now,” he said when we got there, handing me a copy of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. “I don’t want to speak to you until you’re done.”

  I read it. There was no need to threaten; I trusted him. When Roger read The Red and the Black his freshman year at Bard, I read The Red and the Black my sophomore year in high school, ever desperate to follow his lead and to please him. The effort would invariably be rewarded. Roger knew a good book, which I knew because I’d been secretly swiping his books for a long time. I read his junior novelization of Jaws when I wasn’t allowed to see the movie. I extracted Go Ask Alice from under his bed when he wasn’t home. Though I was only supposed to touch the Monster Manual and Deities & Demigods, which had already been sullied by overuse, I would read the forbidden Dungeon Master’s Guide as well and then replace it in precisely the place where I’d found it, as if nothing had happened.

  In the year 2000, to celebrate the new millennium, I made a deal with Roger, one in which I, for once, would dictate the book. If he read War and Peace, I would read War and Peace, and, as a reward, I would fly the two of us to Russia for a vacation. There, we would discuss the Bezukhovs and the Bolkonskys, the Rostovs and the Kuragins, the Drubetskoys and Napoleon and Waterloo and whether it was better than Anna Karenina (which he’d told me to read years earlier) while hurtling by train from Moscow to St. Petersburg.

  Roger had long been my comrade in arms when it came to Russian literature. On a trip to Portland to visit our cousin Kirsten, he shoved into my hands Mikhail Bulgakov’s Soviet-era satire The Master and Margarita. “We’ll talk when you’re done,” he’d said. And because I respected his taste and possibly because I still feared his suspensions, I obeyed. After reading the love story of the imprisoned author the Master and his devoted, besotted Margarita, I passed it on to Kirsten, sealing the familial bond. In Russia, I would be able to repay Roger as we walked through Patriarch Ponds and checked out the graffiti on Bulgakov House, reimagining scenes in which the devil comes to Moscow.

  I was really doing Roger a favor. Everyone intends to read War and Peace eventually, and the Russia trip gave us an excuse. Roger would read his copy in San Francisco, and I would read mine in New York. I’d tried reading it several years earlier and given up around page one hundred, lost. This time, I bought an edition with a crucial addition: a family tree. Aided by this handy patronymic road map, I could be swept into the narrative without forgetting who everyone was.

  The secret that Russian literature aficionados somehow manage to keep from the rest of the world, daunted by names like Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, is that Russian novels are essentially soap operas. Sure, there’s the backdrop of the nineteenth century to contend with, but at heart Russian novels are stories of unrequited love, lusty affairs, and die-hard feuds. Even the long ones can feel too short. War and Peace would be no problem.

  “I’m on it,” Roger told me every time I called to make sure he was keeping up his end of the bargain. Deep into the novel myself, I knew Roger would also love it. We both reveled in the darkly gleeful slapstick of Russian satire. I see myself in every lowly and ill-used clerk from Kovalyov to Golyadkin, and my brother does, too. Anything he laughs at, I laugh at, and vice versa.

  I tore through War and Peace that month, and come March we set off for the motherland. Everything was going according to plan. I couldn’t wait to talk over our Tolstoy.

  “I didn’t read it,” Roger confessed once the plane reached cruising altitude. “But I meant to.”

  I should have known. Except in cases of rare devotion—and even then—trying to make someone read something is like force-feeding a baby. Most people prefer reading what they want to read. This cold fact was particularly upsetting to my father, who viewed reading or watching something he recommended as a demonstration, even a proof, of love. He was obsessed with recommending, cajoling over and over until you submitted. “You have to watch Ballad of a Soldier, he’d insist, strong-arming you into the TV room. “Come in here,” he’d say as soon as I walked into his apartment on the Upper West Side. “I just want to show you one scene from Black Narcissus. Just one scene! Pammy, please!”

  These repeated requests only hardened my lack of interest. I’m not sure why, as his recommendations tended to be worthy, and the palpable joy my mutual enjoyment elicited was its own reward. But I would dig in my heels. Perhaps it was because when I was a child, reading had been my way to declare independence. Perhaps because I too wanted to read what I wanted to read. Watch what I wanted to watch. Choose my own adventures.

  “You’re never going to make your father happy and watch The Red Shoes, are you?” he’d ask miserably. “Can’t you just sit through the opening sequence?” When I started dating, he took to asking my boyfriends instead, where his chances of success were greater. “Have you ever seen Stalingrad?” he’d ask, throwing a paternal arm over some poor guy’s shoulder. “Let me show you the opening scene of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.”

  With books, he was slightly less demanding. I’d see him spread out an illustrated guide to field artillery before one of my decidedly nonmilitaristic boyfriends—like he was sharing a rite of manhood—and plot a rescue operation. He didn’t employ these same tactics with me. It may be he knew I wouldn’t cotton to Robert Ludlum (“They’re not good,” he admitted) or David Baldacci (“These are really terrible, Pammy—but I enjoy them”). My father was an unself-conscious reader, in it for his own pleasure and curiosity, something I, with my studious aspirations and constant looking over my shoulder, envied. He read voraciously, plunging into a subject and dwelling there for years. From Catskills history to old graveyards to the Spanish Civil War, where he embedded himself for well over a decade, supplementing his reading material with folk music and undercover visits to meetings of veterans of the Lincoln Brigade. (“These people are crazy, Pammy! But I find them fascinating.”)

  My new boyfriend Michael was the same way with his books. He read high, he read low, he read in the middle. He read according to whim and mood and passing interest and passion. He read a lot of books I’d never heard of, something I always find especially alluring. And our curiosity about and interest in each other was mutual. When we met, I was reading Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography; he was reading Robert K. Massie’s Dreadnought. We looked at each other’s books and thought, We’re good!

  Shortly into our courtship, I left for Germany on a three-week trip I’d been planning for months but now wished I weren’t doing solo. In Frankfurt, I’d be staying with college friends who were working in finance; in Heidelberg, I’d visit my French sister, Juliette, there on a postdoctoral fellowship in biogenetics. I had a magazine story to write in Baden-Baden (hardship assignment on the city’s storied baths). Everything had been carefully mapped out, but already I felt like someone was missing.

  At every village with an Internet café, I stopped to check for messages from Michael. I thought about what he would think when we returned togeth
er to those very same spots one day. Would he also love the museum of advertising? Would he marvel at the wooded twists of the Alpenstrasse? The few moments not devoted to what he thought were spent thinking about what our children would think and how much they would like the cuckoo clock museum.

  When I got back to New York, I had my usual Bob update to do: I entered the books I’d read on my trip, a random assortment of paperbacks given to me by a friend who worked in publishing, into my Book of Books. And then I found myself thinking about a literary present I wanted to give to Michael (I’d brought back only a small matchbox from Germany, from a guesthaus bearing his family name). This was a coup, but the next gift would be more meaningful. A few weeks later, sitting on a bench in Central Park one night, I presented him with a small wrapped package containing three books: Middlemarch, because I adored George Eliot and was making my way through her entire oeuvre (still not Romola, I must confess). Buddenbrooks, because I was determined to keep Thomas Mann as my own rather than allow him to become a relic of my ex-husband. And The Master and Margarita, because my brother had passed it to me and I’d passed it to Kirsten, and I felt fairly certain that Michael was soon to be part of this circle. I inscribed each of them with messages.

  These three books weren’t my favorites. Nor did I expect Michael to read them right away. It just seemed that if I were going to get involved with someone and he were going to get involved with me, he should get a sense of what moved me on the page. I wanted to please him and for him to be pleased by me. The prospect of finding someone who takes as much pleasure in the book as I do is often more a reward than the book itself. A little like my dad, after all.

  To my astonishment, Michael began reading right away. He didn’t like the books nearly as much as I did and his takeaways often differed radically from my own. But that was okay—he wanted to know about what I read and what I thought. He later went on to buy me a replacement set of Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers and a beautiful edition of George Eliot’s letters. My books, my life of the mind and of the heart, meant something to him. And his did to me. Michael’s shelves were stocked with contemporary British novelists I’d never heard of, long-forgotten fiction from the 1970s, books about computer hackers and mountain-climbing accidents, polemics about civil liberties, and outdated computer manuals.

  There was nothing I would have read on my own in the past and a lot of it I had no desire to read in the future. But his books showed a very different mind at work. I didn’t know what to expect from this person, and in a dating world that can feel wearyingly predictable, this was exciting.

  When Michael gave a toast at our wedding, he pointed out that I’d given him “a reading list” early on in our relationship.

  Chief amongst these was George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and as you can imagine I read the book with a particular interest in determining what characters, or episodes, or deft turns of phrase had made her so recommend this book to me …

  Book two on the list was Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. This was more encouraging. It is the story of, among other things, a beautiful woman who falls for a guy who gets arrested and then hides himself in an insane asylum for years so as not to embarrass her … In the words of Bulgakov, “Love caught us suddenly, leapt at us like a murderer appearing from nowhere in an alley, and struck us both down at once. Like lightning, like a Finnish knife! However, afterwards she insisted it was not so, that we had loved each other for a long, long time, without knowing one another, never having met…”

  The toast went on—not just about the books I’d given him, but about everything I’d given him so far and everything he’d given me and what we both planned to give each other in the future. He ended with a quote from Great Expectations. What could I say? I was humbled and I was dazzled and I was sure. Shortly after we’d met, I introduced Michael to Bob, and he came up with his own variation, the Blob—Big List of Books—which he put on his computer. Not long after that, he entered Buddenbrooks into his Big List of Books. He keeps his Blob still.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Hunger Games

  No Time to Read

  I’d just given birth after a long and well-medicated labor that ended with my second son, Theodore. He was an unexpectedly immense nine-and-a-half-pound baby, fat and uncomplaining. My recovery was swift. This was my third child and the easiest of my childbirths. Most mothers would have bolted from the hospital, especially if their two other children at home were still rather young. But I chose to stay an extra day.

  I wish I could say it was because I worried that the new baby’s siblings, Tobias and Beatrice, two and four years old respectively, would steal attention away from him. But this would not be completely honest. In truth, I stayed in the hospital because I was in the middle of The Hunger Games. I’d started reading it in early labor, paused so that I could give birth, and then picked it back up to read almost immediately after Teddy was born and latched on, reading as I nursed. It was a genuine page-turner, and for once, with great pleasure, I had time to turn the pages.

  Nobody could interrupt to ask for a snack. Nobody needed me to wrestle with a shoe. I didn’t have to furrow my brow through background shrieks of wants and needs, or anticipate who would ask next for help tracking down a misplaced lovey. I hadn’t read like this for years.

  Glued to the story of teenagers murdering each other for survival, I hardly noticed whether Teddy ate or slept. When will the rebellion begin, I wanted to know. Which suitor would the killer heroine Katniss choose? It was fine for me to turn my attention to these matters. This was my third child and I knew what I was doing, babywise. I expertly breastfed him as I raced through the pages with one finger, each of us occupied and contented. It wasn’t until halfway through the final book in the trilogy that I realized Teddy was taking an awfully long time to tank up. Turns out, he hadn’t been latched on properly the entire time. And here I was reading a book called The Hunger Games! Once I put the book down, I returned to my resting emotional state of maternal guilt.

  These lunatic years of turbo lactivism, nursing my children until they were weaned, were tainted not by formula but by the competing desire to read while they fed. Breast-feeding your children can be a beautiful, bonding experience when it does not involve undue pain or inconvenience. But let me be clear: it is also a perfect time for reading, the mom version of dad hanging out on the toilet with an iPad. Everything about breastfeeding lends itself to the practice. The dedicated nursing pillows prop up books as well as they do babies. The baby, staring off into the middle distance, doesn’t seem bothered and may even be enjoying the story in some way. Oxytocin, the “love hormone,” leaves the nursing mother unusually calm and focused. I felt the stories more.

  This nurse-reading opportunity made itself known early on. A few months after my first child was born, I was working from home as a freelancer, taking a self-imposed “maternity leave” from writing books and chasing down magazine and newspaper assignments, when an editor at the New York Times Book Review asked me to review a book. It was supposed to be my time off, but since I was the one giving and taking that time, the rules behind this policy were distinctly loose. I read the e-mail request, then looked over at Beatrice. She was zonked out peacefully in her bassinet, a real sleeper. This was an infant who slumbered by our side even as Michael and I watched Black Hawk Down at full volume twelve inches away. “Sure,” I e-mailed back. “Send it over.”

  The book arrived and it was charming, The Lady and the Panda, which told the story of Ruth Harkness and her efforts to bring the first panda bear from China to America, a tale distinguished by a complicated heroine, adorable baby pandas, and a tragic ending. Over this absorbing narrative, I learned how to balance my daughter on my nursing pillow, prop up my book, and blissfully engage with both. The review was glowing.

  Two years later, another baby, another e-mail from the Book Review. “Sure,” I wrote back, glancing contentedly at Tobias, only four weeks old and fast asleep.

  The book arrived
and Tobias woke up, as babies are wont to do after those first deceptively somnolent weeks. He promptly issued a whole set of demands. He would sleep only if tightly swaddled with arms immobilized, and at the same time and rather determinedly, he would sleep only swaddle-free, his arms swinging wildly overhead. Or, two minutes later, he would sleep only if I laid him across my lap and sat still and silent and yet somehow, at the same time, only while I held him aloft, cradling him back and forth with a knee-bending sway, cooing rhythmically. I scrambled to keep up with his shifting parameters, double guessing and waiting for maternal know-how to arrive at a definitive solution.

  Meanwhile, the assigned book for review was a stew of political theory mumbo jumbo as written by a team of second-rate grad students. When Tobias wasn’t wailing at me for not sleeping him right, I was scowling at the terrible book. Every moment, baby or book, was a misery. I wrote a scathing review. My editor assured me I’d done readers a service. People have limited time for books, and the job of reviewers is to help them make choices.

  Most people in the throes of parenting have little time to read. Instead, time is spent strategizing how to meet the barest requirements of adulthood, with reading a vice snuck on the sly like an afternoon cocktail. My lifelong requirement to read before bed, no matter how late the hour and preceded by a vastly underestimating “I just need to read one page,” now actually often ends at exactly that: one page. So much energy is expended dashing frantically from task to task that the sporadic slap to the forehead, “I forgot about Bob!” has escalated in frequency. By the time I remember to note a book in his pages, I sometimes have to struggle to remember the title. Twenty minutes more sleep at night would surely enhance that ability. But who has time for that?

  There’s nothing unusual about the no-time-for-books complaint, but it feels like a fireable offense when reading is your job. Publishers, editors, authors, fellow readers know you can’t read everything, but expect it anyway. I kind of expect it, too. If I tell someone I’m going to read a book, I do. It’s that hard-to-shake feeling that someone will ferret out the lapse if you don’t. “You there,” I half expect someone to corner me and say. “What did you make of chapter seven?” Half my book-related conversations seem to begin with someone asking, “Have you read X or Y book?” followed by a doleful, “No, have you?”