My Life with Bob Read online

  “The girl looked at him and said, ‘Buzz off.’”

  That was it. End of activity. There was no discussion of the story, of what it meant, of its relevance, of why I’d decided to read it to a bunch of kids from school. I conducted the reading like a sermon. Why a teacher or librarian didn’t question this practice I have never understood. In my mind, I was performing a service: Here is what you need to know. And moreover, This is what I wish you knew about me. Or knew that I know.

  It was my inchoate way of declaring to the rest of my high school classmates where I stood. Ericka and I and a few other friends didn’t fit neatly into any one group. We were more like floaters, and even among the floaters, I didn’t have any defining characteristic; there was no part for me in the John Hughes lineup. Everyone else had some kind of identity—the lacrosse player, the theater person, the hot arty guy, the popular one, the popular one who’s also a good student—part of me wanted to stake out mine: book person.

  A book person was someone who knew things other kids didn’t. She knew about culture and art, about literary alliances and feuds, about writers who had made it, writers who were on the cusp, and writers who had fallen out of favor. She knew which books mattered.

  A book person had her own sources and understood the use of imagination. By declaring yourself a book person, you could make your fellow students aware that you were privy to another dimension of the world, and so the slights in their world—not having a boyfriend or not getting invited to a party or not having the right sweatshirt or not achieving a certain rank in the suburban hierarchy—didn’t matter. You were part of something else.

  I had not yet made the transition from thinking that everything in a book was true and good to being a discriminating or even a mildly skeptical reader. I didn’t question whether the urban life depicted in the books I deemed sophisticated and desirable was in fact a happy one, with depth or consequence. Instead, I hoovered it all up into the vacuum of my mind. I felt ahead of the game, convinced that if only I read enough books, I would have everything I needed for the life I wanted, both aware and unaware of how little I really knew.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Trial

  A Book with No Ending

  I was supposed to be asleep. Instead I was reading The Trial on the sly, camped out in a dorm bed in rural France, hiding my book under the covers like a forbidden telephone after hours. I turned the pages quickly but quietly, desperate to know the ending but for nobody to know I was even awake. I was missing all my classes and let everyone think I was sick, but the truth was I had jet lag and a hangover. I was seventeen, this was my first time abroad, and it turned out I was a big baby when it came to switching time zones.

  Falling in with Sigrid, a girl as hard-edged as her name, during the predeparture orientation on Long Island had not been helpful. We were supposed to be preparing for our impending summer abroad, a cultural immersion program run by the American Field Service, which would begin with a month of classes and culminate in a monthlong homestay with a French family. Instead, we’d ditched the prep schedule to “party” in an abandoned college lounge.

  Sigrid has to mean “up to no good” in some language. Flown in from one suburban wasteland or another, she had forced yellow hair, pointed features, and an inborn smirk; if it had been the aughts and not the eighties, she would have had multiple piercings and at least one Sanskrit tattoo. After several hours of drinking smuggled alcohol, she whipped out a joint, which she sprinkled with white powder from a small vial. Cocaine! Sigrid reeled in another blonde, who partook with gusto. This second girl looked like Marilyn Monroe, and we shellacked her in Maybelline to accentuate the resemblance, then took dozens of Polaroid pictures of ourselves, mostly the second blonde, who struck a series of half-lidded poses. In the course of forty-eight hours, we used most of the film intended to document our respective summers abroad.

  I nearly left my camera behind. I nearly missed the plane. I almost wished I had missed the plane, because it hit a patch of rough air over the Atlantic and dipped its way to Europe in bell-curved swoops. I’d never been on an overseas flight and was petrified. By the time we got to France, I felt more dead than alive. I have no recollection of the journey out of Paris, other than that it took place under a sour pall of resentment at being cheated out of the most important part of the country. A lucky batch of students got to stay in the Île de France area while the rest of us splintered off into various corners of the country. Somehow, my group made its way to the tiny backwater of Mauriac, a place so lost in the center of France that every French person I’ve met subsequently has furrowed their brow in confusion when I named the location of my July 1988 sojourn: “Où?! C’est dans quel département? Mais c’est n’importe où!,” which translates roughly into “Where the hell is that?”

  Even a parochial American adolescent could tell that Mauriac was up somewhere in France’s armpit. I had finally gotten “out there”—outside my books and my town and into a life that could possibly be a story instead of just a life reading about other people’s stories—and yet I was still nowhere, in the kind of charmless spot even Peter Mayle couldn’t make appealing. Why, of all corners of France, from its alpine heights to its Mediterranean beaches to its lavender-scented hills to its chic metropolises, had I been sent to wretched Mauriac, a down-on-its-heels town with one hypermarché and a dwindling population of four thousand? A place known primarily for its cheese, which frankly isn’t a mark of distinction in rural France. A place founded as if in error, when the daughter of a Frankish king had a vision of the Virgin Mary carrying the baby Jesus and accompanied by Saint Peter, which led her to build a chapel by a small stream. She’d clearly been deluded onto this path to nowhere. Everything about this place was wrong and I, peevish teenage ingrate, felt wronged, too.

  I was epically hungover and thoroughly jet-lagged, and like a child angrily scratching at a poison ivy rash to make it go away, I kept making it worse. I refused to enter my new time zone and slept instead, waking up at odd hours and reading, reading, reading.

  Kafka’s opening line in The Trial seemed to carry a personal message, as it surely has for many readers feeling surly with the world: “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” Exactly right. I, too, was being unfairly punished. Fine, I’d been a bad kid, skipping out on orientation, but was that so disgraceful I had to be stuck in a town where acid-washed jeans were still the height of fashion? (Sigrid was long gone, swept off to some doubtless more sophisticated province where she was probably shooting up French heroin.)

  The other kids in my unit surely hated me already. What kind of jerk has the audacity to blow off an entire transatlantic orientation program? Why come to France if you aren’t going to participate? Who’s so fancy or neurasthenic she can’t bother getting out of bed for thirty-six hours?

  It felt appropriate then that I was reading The Trial, a tale of injustice if ever there was one. I, too, was the victim of a cruel and arbitrary yet somehow preordained fate. All my seventeen years, I’d never gotten to travel, a tragedy rubbed in by classmates from the wealthier parts of town, kids who seemed to fly off to Club Med every winter break, their peeled noses a mark of status upon return. My family, an unwieldy blend of stepfamilies totaling eight kids, never went on vacation. We didn’t have the money, there were too many of us, and not enough of us got along.

  Instead, we had sporadic visits to indifferent grandparents in Florida and Virginia and long weekends of East Coast skiing, during which my brothers paired up with my city stepbrothers and dumped me in the singles line, yet another instance in which being the only girl was a strike against me. Once they abandoned me at Killington, where I descended the wrong slope of the mountain and cried into a mound of dirty snow until an announcement over the resort’s loudspeakers summoned me to return. Other kids at school seemed to go to Italy or even Disney World. I’d been to Disney World once, back when you had to pay
per ride and so I got to choose exactly one (It’s a Small World, no less); we ate warm Saran-wrapped sandwiches that we brought with us because eating out was “a fortune”—don’t even think about asking for a Mickey Mouse–shaped balloon. I was too busy feeling deprived to realize that this was still in fact rather privileged.

  And now, once again, my parents’ stinginess had ruined things; if only I’d been allowed to do the more upscale Experiment in International Living program rather than the cut-rate AFS. Of course I’d ended up tired and friendless in a lost patch of barely French France.

  I was adolescence incarnate. And like many adolescents full of adolescent feelings, I wanted to commemorate my angst and fury the way adolescents do: in a diary. I had brought a blank book with me to France, purchased at a local stationery store for its forbidding charcoal exterior and wide-open unlined pages. This diary, I’d decided from the get-go, would be different from all my previous diaries, each of which I’d pushed aside in dismay after a few months of erratic entries.

  Those diaries were hellish. For the most part, I’d open them only when I’d sunk to a true low, and as a last and loathsome resort. I wrote when I found out that Katie had slept over Ingrid’s house after she’d said no to sleeping over mine. I wrote when Ingrid and Wendy played a prank by using the then new conference call function to simultaneously get me and a stranger on the phone together, each of us thinking the other had initiated the call, and then cackle inaudibly at our mutual confusion. I wrote when every single one of my silent, humiliating crushes in junior high went unnoticed or ignored, each awful in its own way—and, in the aggregate, devastating. I wrote when I was angry, I wrote when I was rejected, I wrote when I felt fat-thighed or uncoordinated or especially pimple-ridden.

  On occasion, I’d pick up an old diary, hoping to see flashes of Anne Frank or at least a Judy Blume character, some flicker of talent or originality of thought. I found nothing of the sort. Instead, revisiting past entries became an exercise in regret, a resurrection of dormant upset and humiliation, all of it in flustered prose full of delusional self-promises and fleeting gusts of determination, ink swelling where I’d leaned heavily on the pen as I wrote: “I’m never calling Wendy again!” “Could it be possible he likes me, too, but is too proud to admit it?” “I didn’t want to go to that stupid beach party, anyway.”

  Not surprisingly, these diaries did not make for a pleasant or rewarding reading experience. No way was I going to vomit my insecurities and insults into another one, not on my first trip abroad, not the summer before my senior year, not so close to my impending collegiate escape. No. This diary would be about something better than me, or rather about the better part of me, the imagined part, and yet the real part. This book would be about my books.

  One morning, when nobody else was in the dormitory, after I finished the last pages of The Trial and put it on the shelf over my bed, I pulled down the new diary and a pen. Across the top of the first page, I wrote my name in black ink and, directly below, “Book Journal.” Then I flipped the page and began my Book of Books. Neatly across the top, I wrote in underlined columns: “Date,” “Author,” “Title.” And I marked down my first entry: “July/August 1988, Kafka, The Trial.” Later, I would add an asterisk next to Kafka’s name and the names of all the other books I read that summer. This symbol I gave to books that were fun reading, my books. Books for school, which dominated during that period of my life, would go unmarked; they were the default. (This designation later reversed, then disappeared altogether.)

  I didn’t tell anyone else at AFS about my new diary; like my hangover and the rudimentary state of my French and The Trial under my covers, it was my secret. My book of books. My Bob.

  Eventually, I made a few friends, the kind one now sees scroll by on Facebook, though none of them close enough to tell about Bob. As it happens, the closest friend I made in France wasn’t even there. Reading a letter over the shoulder of a fellow AFS student named Susie, I met someone for the first time purely through writing. He was sharp, opinionated, and very, very funny. He wrote far better than anyone I knew spoke, not just getting the words out but choosing them with consideration before committing them to the page.

  “Who wrote this?” I asked Susie when I got to the end of the letter, which read as if it had been written as much for the sake of the writing as for the conveyance of information. The handwriting was exquisite, the kind girls with calligraphy kits fantasize about; writing was something to which he paid attention.

  “My friend Josh,” Susie said.

  “This is the best letter I’ve ever read. Can I have his address?”

  And so I wrote Josh back. (“I read the letter you wrote to Susie, and I just have to say, I’ve never read such a…”) We began a correspondence that continued through the following school year, peaking at the moment we thought we might actually go to the same college and falling off the way high school friends do when he decided on another school instead. But throughout that summer and our senior year, he wrote to me from his suburb of Cincinnati and I wrote back from my suburb of New York.

  Once in college, I forgot about Josh. But years later, back in New York, I was rifling through a copy of the Washington Monthly and saw his name on the masthead. I sent off a letter immediately. “I knew you were a good writer!” I exclaimed. We corresponded briefly and several years after that I found his name among the instructors teaching writing at the New School. I decided to surprise him by stopping by the first class to introduce myself.

  “We meet at last!” I cried when he walked in. It had been nine years since our first letter exchange. Since then, we’ve e-mailed.

  After the monthlong confinement in Mauriac, I was shipped out to my homestay with a commuter family in a nondescript suburb of Albi, birthplace of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who had hightailed it to Paris, and one hour north of Toulouse, home of the French airline industry. The father was an engineer; the mother held a nondescript part-time office job and was Italian by birth. At first, I felt ripped off anew, as if her national origin made my French homestay somehow inauthentic. Wasn’t I supposed to be learning about French culture? But she grew vegetables in the backyard and made a tomato tart that rivaled the best New York pizza. For the first time in my life, I ate tomatoes that weren’t pinkish simulacrums from Burger King, biting into them like apples. I had nothing in common with this family but I grew to appreciate them.

  The twin five-year-old girls were still learning to pronounce their French r’s, and I liked listening as they gurgled “Encore! Encore!” when they wanted another helping at dinner. I realized for the first time that when concert audiences cheer for an encore, they are actually pleading, “More! More!” like small children. The twins beat me handily at French Scrabble, which is pronounced in French exactly how you think it would be pronounced. These losses stung, conveying to me in no uncertain terms: You know nothing of this language. I still had so much to learn.

  But that was pretty much it as far as cultural immersion went. With nowhere to go and no way to get there, I loitered around the house like a sullen French teen, perusing La Redoute catalogs and trying to make use of the Minitel, a pre-Internet networked service that looked like a portable Apple II Plus. On the television, I watched outdated episodes of the soap opera Santa Barbara, in which a very young Robin Wright emoted in dubbed French. On the radio, the pouty pop princess Vanessa Paradis had a hit song, “Marilyn et John,” which competed in heavy rotation against her previous hit, “Joe Le Taxi.” She would go on to star in a Chanel commercial and have children with Johnny Depp; that summer she breathily provided my life soundtrack.

  Given that I was spending the summer lolling about, only Frenchly, I was relieved to have brought my own books—Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember. But once those were done, in an effort to absorb the language, I picked up a couple of native paperbacks from a rotating rack at the local drugstore. Unfamiliar with contemporary Francophone literature and daunte
d by the prospect of Hugo or Balzac, I went straight for the lesser challenge of American translation: Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon and Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, in livre de poche form for French escapists. Though I’d already read both in English, I made it only several chapters into each, winded by the effort.

  Guiltily, I put an “inc.” in the Book of Books next to these lapses, an impromptu notation for “incomplete.” Those “inc.”s bummed me out. A doer of assignments and a fan of last pages, I liked to finish what I began. Later in Bob, the “inc.” became a more succinct empty square next to the title, noting in a more muted fashion when I gave up on a book. What I hated or couldn’t finish or failed to grasp was often as telling as what I did manage to complete. Just like a regular diary, Bob would record my failings, however noble.

  There was quite a bit of failure in store that summer. I didn’t entirely learn to read in French and I didn’t see the France I’d come to see and I didn’t fully integrate into the culture or even bond with my fellow Americans abroad. The person I’d gotten to know best in France was spending his summer outside Cincinnati. Things were being left undone.

  So it was only appropriate in the Book of Books with The Trial, a novel that never ends. This was not a perversely inspired stroke. When I’d picked it up, dazzled by Mikhail Baryshnikov’s recent Broadway turn in Metamorphosis, I’d no idea Kafka never finished it. On the contrary, I’d urgently awaited the story’s resolution, needed it—the meting out of punishment and forgiveness, the tying up of loose ends and righting of wrongs.

  Instead, Joseph K. spends this last chapter refusing to kill himself, whereupon he is perfunctorily knifed to death in a brief final chapter. After this “ending,” my edition moved on to several pages of unfinished chapters, deleted passages, diary excerpts, and assorted postscripts. Even with this bonus material, we never find out Joseph K.’s crime. Had Kafka intended to leave the crime unspecified, if there even was one? There was no way of knowing and no fellow Kafka readers to ask; there was no Internet to consult.