My Life with Bob Read online

  “Les prunes de la fureur!” I broke out excitedly.

  There was silence. A neat oval of blank French facial expressions gaped at me.

  “Les quois?” someone finally asked.

  “Les prunes de la fureur?” I repeated, a smidge less sure.

  “Les quois de la fureur?” Slowly.

  Really?! Could they not know? Was it possible The Grapes of Wrath, celebrated paean to the working classes, was not part of the Steinbeck oeuvre revered by the unrepentantly socialist French?

  Well, sure, it was possible. The French did have their cultural blind spots, often about American things. They were occasionally odd in their choice of artistic icons, persuaded that becoming a Bond girl was an untarnished achievement for a French actress, for example. Come to think about it, the dinner gathering had only been talking about Travels with Charley, Of Mice and Men, and Cannery Row. Had I found a gap in their knowledge?

  I had not. I had found a gap in my French.

  “Les raisins de la colère!” someone suddenly shrieked into the silence with a flash of insight. “Les raisins de la colère!” everyone repeated, bursting into laughter. Of course everyone at the table knew The Grapes of Wrath.

  What had I said? The Plums of Fury. I went purple with embarrassment, only slightly less severe for having committed the error in a foreign language. For weeks after the incident, people joyously repeated “Les prunes de la fureur!” whenever they saw me or caught me making a simple grammatical error.

  But here’s what made the mockery bearable: they all got the joke. There was no need to articulate why it was funny or describe the special humiliation that happens when you try to sound smart about a book and fail. These people were readers. Nobody thought you pretentious for bringing up a work of classic literature. I belonged here.

  Up until now, reading had been a lonely pursuit. During the benighted eighties, kids didn’t go to bookstore readings or await the next Harry Potter on bustling lines at midnight. There were no embossed buttons or fan clubs for favored series. Children didn’t tweet at authors or enter a chat room to compare Wings of Fire dragon tribes with other followers.

  Though not quite in the same damning category as chess, reading was far from lacrosse in the high school pecking order. No one ever discussed it. In college, books assigned for class were read as competitive sport—the more critically, the better—and no one seemed to have time to read for pleasure. You didn’t talk about liking a book; you ripped it to pieces.

  The Mathieus were the first family of dedicated readers I’d met. They passed cherished volumes insistently among themselves like household secrets. My new French “parents,” Carole and Bertrand Mathieu—she oversaw a research department at the École Polytechnique, he was an architect—had just purchased their Paris apartment with a small inheritance so Carole could live part-time in the city and send her older daughter to a prestigious high school in the Marais, while Bertrand stayed at their house in Picardy. It was an unusual arrangement, even for the French. Carole thought it good for a married couple not to see each other so much. I thought she was brilliant.

  Carole and Bertrand were die-hard soixante-huitards, committed socialists, and thorough French traditionalists, with strong opinions. Architecture, according to Bertrand, was life’s highest calling. He had little stickers inciting you to “Dare to be an architect” stuck to various surfaces around the house. Carole loved working at her office, even though she couldn’t care less about business management, the section she oversaw. She smoked two packs of filterless Gitanes a day and held anyone who didn’t smoke in contempt; people who had an occasional cigarette were similarly worthless. She refused to drink water, which she found repugnant, but always had a glass of whiskey at cocktail hour “comme un bon alcolo.” Once a year, she took a solo vacation at the cottage Bertrand had built for them on an island in Brittany. “I stare at the ocean and read my books, all by myself. C’est mer-veill-eux.”

  My sixteen-year-old “little sister,” Juliette, would finish her schoolwork and then smoke in her bedroom over Dostoyevsky at night. Years later, after getting a doctorate in biogenetics and while working at the Institut Pasteur, she would read all of Zola’s novels to get through her first pregnancy. Just like all American women do.

  Books lined the walls of their apartment and the shelves of their ramshackle country house. Bathrooms teemed with BDs (bandes dessinées, or graphic novels, a form the French were considerably more advanced in) and paperback fiction in translation from Tunisia, sub-Saharan Africa, Poland, and the American West. At night, the Mathieus dispersed, paperbacks in tow. “I am with my book now, in my bed,” was a common refrain. My bedroom on the rue Rambuteau was a tiny nook of a room where, nestled like a kid in a tent, I, too, would read for hours. Of course, I told the Mathieus all about my Book of Books, and of course, they got Bob right away. “Quelle bonne idée!” Carole declared.

  In France, the stakes in literature class were comfortably low; nobody in the study-abroad program was actually there to study. But the structure of the course allowed us to fake it, literally. Each week, we were given a reading assignment in French and then asked to write a “pastiche” in that particular writer’s style. We read Proust’s “La prisonnière,” then wrote stories with long sentences with many commas. We read Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit and wrote angry diatribes full of foulmouthed invective and poorly composed mash-ups. For Colette’s La vagabonde, we pounded out lusty sex scenes involving petite French women. The Mathieus found these exercises ludicrous.

  But I was more cheerful about it because it turned out I had a decent talent for aping other people’s work. My French improved rapidly, if not for the most flattering reason: I was a hopeless mimic. Stick me with French people, and I begin to speak like a French person. Put me in a conversation with a Brit, and within moments I’m peppering my sentences with “rubbish” and “brilliant” and “at the end of day,” a tendency ripe for ridicule.

  Senior year, as soon as school broke for winter recess, I flew right back to the Mathieus for three weeks’ vacation. I also went there directly after graduation, before heading to an internship in the South of France, and when that turned out to be a fiasco, I called Carole, asking to be rescued. “Quick—come to French mommy!” she replied, and I spun right around back to Paris again.

  This time, I wasn’t there to learn and I wasn’t there to visit; I needed to make up the money I’d expected to earn at the failed internship. If you had no working papers, in the brutal parlance of the time, you had to find work au noir—literally “like a black person,” or paid under the table. The expression was so widely used it was impossible to solicit job applications without it. The alternative was to let out a tangle of words (hors du loi? sans papiers? illégalement?) that would only persuade potential employers that you didn’t speak French.

  In the end, it was an American company, Häagen-Dazs, that was willing to pay me au noir; perhaps that was just their way. My new job title was scoopeuse.

  All the aping of French writing and reading of French comic strips and chatting with the Mathieus had by this point led to a certain level of fluency. This was the first foreign language I’d successfully learned, and it went straight to my head. Once installed behind the counter, I adopted the singsongy cadence and snide attitude of the most Parisian of shop clerks. I greeted each customer with ferocity.

  “Bonjour! Qu’est-ce que vous désirez?”

  “Oui! Vous voulez en cornet ou en pot?”

  All this with a rapid-fire Parisian delivery and a refusal to downshift into English for baffled tourists, which at the time I rationalized as far less condescending than the remedial English most shopkeepers reverted to when faced with the Obviously Not French. Even flavor titles like Peanut Butter Burst were rendered in a decisive French accent. The Americans who patronized our shop expressed open confusion at their silly scoopeuse. “What the hell are pepites?” they’d ask each other while I stared back in resolute French silen
ce. What were they doing getting American ice cream in Paris anyway?

  On busy days, the manager thrust a popsicle stand out into the square, which one of us had to man at our peril. A hardy band of Roma considered the square theirs and attacked whoever occupied that cart. Roma mothers would point us out to their children, demonstrating how to throw stray litter at our uniforms and accosting us with disagreeable shouts. Who knows what Häagen-Dazs had done to inspire the vitriol but, as the company’s Place des Fontaines representative, I wanted to avoid getting garbage on the apron I was responsible for perfecting each morning. (Later, in an attempt to understand the Roma, I read Isabel Fonseca’s devastating book Bury Me Standing, which explained the hardships the Roma have long endured. The title comes from a Roma expression, “Bury me standing, I’ve been on my knees all my life.”)

  Even in August, nearly emptied of Parisians, the city was my refuge. My Häagen-Dazs was near an enormous subterranean mall with one of the best branches of FNAC, a mega-multimedia store along the lines of Barnes & Noble. After work, I’d head into FNAC, where I’d rummage through the BDs and stare at the glossy white covers of the livres de poche, curious to see which American authors merited translation. I’d walk across to the Left Bank and explore the tiny bookshops of the rue des Écoles and the movie houses of the 6th arrondissement. The city devoted so much space to the things I cared about, I wanted to kiss the sidewalk in gratitude.

  Paris became my regular escape hatch, the place I’d run off to whenever the cultural and intellectual and gut-level need arose. Over the next fifteen years, I would go to Paris more than a dozen times. (This isn’t as obnoxious as it sounds: flights cost three hundred dollars round-trip and I slept on spare mattresses; it was a relatively cheap vacation.) And it was deeply therapeutic. I went there after a failed relationship; I went there after a failed job. I’d stay with the Mathieus, my thoughts paralleled in Claire Bretécher’s Les Frustrés comic strips, marveling at how fully she captured the vicissitudes of my life, like a Frenchified Roz Chast. One summer, I read Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror at the Mathieus’ house outside Paris, from which I could visit the actual Château de Coucy, only a few towns away; this was life as it should be.

  It was in Paris that I finally felt distant enough from the person I was in New York, the one who spent her twenties hustling away at marketing jobs while really wanting to be a writer, and comfortable enough to admit to anyone that maybe I actually was a writer. If there’s any place on the planet where you can feel comfortable articulating an artistic or intellectual desire without feeling like a pretentious idiot (or at least more of a pretentious idiot than anyone else), surely it is Paris.

  By the year 2000, I’d been freelancing for the Economist for several years, but the magazine had no bylines. Without my name inked permanently onto a piece of circulating paper, I didn’t feel legit. I’d just quit my job at a media conglomerate to work on my first book; I was trying to write full-time for the first time in my life and I was nervous about the entire enterprise. One afternoon, my adoptive French sister, Juliette, and French brother, Paul, had friends over for lunch and we were crowded around the kitchen table. A friend of Paul’s asked what I did for a living.

  “Je suis écrivain,” I ventured in a tentative voice. I had never said it before. In French, you don’t say “I am a writer,” you say, “I am writer,” which gives the statement an even more boastful and pompous air. Writer, like poet or philosopher, isn’t one of those job titles that rolls off the tongue in any language. The essayist Phillip Lopate once described the trepidation of declaring himself a writer for the first time. “I felt as though I were feigning a part, but what I would come to learn was that bluffing is an integral part of becoming a writer: you bluff and you bluff, until one day the world starts to treat you like a writer and you think (you are the last one to think it), ‘Well maybe I actually am one,’ still feeling mentally puny.”

  I did feel dangerously small, but under the veil of translation and with the distance from home and the immediate embrace of the Mathieus as a layer of protection, it was possible I had a case. Nobody knew that back home I wasn’t really a writer, not yet. Nobody here in Paris thought I was obsessed with words. It was okay to devote hours to considering which book to read next, and to have the audacity to try writing one. Perhaps here I could pass.

  “Oh, là, là, Paméla est écrivain!” Paul repeated in a mock haute Parisian accent when his friend looked impressed. But it was brotherly and affectionate, and Paul’s eyes twinkled. He may have been making fun of me, but he was also proud. Most important, he believed me when I said it, which made it seem like it might even be true. I felt only slightly idiotic, but that may be the smartest, or at least safest, way to feel when you’re starting out as a writer in this world.

  CHAPTER 8

  A Journey of One’s Own

  Books That Change Your Life

  It’s one thing to read books, quite another to presume to be involved in their creation. At Brown, a place swarming with smart and talented writers, to want to be a writer or to in some way participate in the literary world had meant facing a terrifying competition. Rather than risk failing at something, I did what so many college students at sea do: I aimed for something I didn’t really want. The reward would be diminished, but so would the risk. I’d spent twenty-two years responding to fear with caution. Why stop now?

  Sometimes it takes a book to jolt you out of where you are. It doesn’t have to be a great book. Just the right book at the right moment, one that opens something up or exposes you to something new or somehow forces you to reexamine your life; the sustained and immersive experience of reading a book can do this in ways not even the best TV show or movie can. It can be altogether transformative.

  In the spring of 1993 I needed that kind of book. It was my senior year in college, and I was in a University Career Services office, talking to a recruiter from Quaker Oats.

  “Pleasantly sweet, yet tangy,” I chirped with a smile, extolling the virtues of Cap’n Crunch cereal with Crunch Berries. And then I stopped.

  In a moment of clarity, I saw myself from a bird’s-eye view, self-conscious and in a stiff J.Crew suit reciting canned oratory about packaged goods. Look at that nervous young woman trying to persuade someone to let her peddle sugar-coated cereal to goggle-eyed children, kids who would surely be better off eating pretty much anything else. She was not the person I wanted to be. I felt a wash of nausea, as if I’d actually consumed an entire box of Crunch Berries. Was this what all the reading and studying and career planning had been for, the reason my parents had forked over tens of thousands of dollars for a fancy education?

  Why did I want to work at Quaker Oats? That was the question the interviewer was asking and he needed an answer.

  I had found one possible answer at the local bookstore, but it was to the wrong question. That question was one I’d been asking myself over the last few months, and it was even more intimidating. What if I didn’t get a job, not at Quaker Oats, not anywhere? It was a realistic, and frightening, possibility. The economy was mired in a recession. I wasn’t very good at interviewing. I didn’t really want to do what I didn’t really want to do, and it seemed the people interviewing me could tell.

  The last time I’d openly admitted to wanting to be a writer was on an application for the Coca-Cola/Martin Luther King Scholarship senior year in high school; I’d won third prize. (“I would like to be a senator, both at the state and federal level. Also, I would like to be a writer—fiction and nonfiction.”) I’d entered dozens such competitions to help supplement my financial aid package—I’d also won third place in the Seventeen magazine short-story contest. For that, my prize was a Brother word processor, useful because I couldn’t afford a computer. After these decent but not stellar performances, I’d made college slightly cheaper but given up openly aiming for a life in letters.

  The runner-up jobs, writing for a magazine or working at a publishing house, didn’t pay enough f
or me to support myself, and I was scared to apply anyway. As for the money jobs, no matter how hard I tried to conform to corporate expectations, I didn’t seem to be what they wanted. They could smell my ambivalence.

  But one book suggested a tantalizing alternative: A Journey of One’s Own: Uncommon Advice for the Independent Woman Traveler had been published just the year before by the spectacularly named Thalia Zepatos. “A teacher, spokeswoman, and heroine of sorts to a generation of travelers” (according to the Seattle Times), Zepatos had traveled to fifty countries by plane, train, donkey, camel, oxcart, bicycle, bus, truck, boat, and foot. Then she wrote a book urging other women to do the same. I should have been ingesting passages of What Color Is Your Parachute?, but I bought Zepatos’s book instead.

  A Journey of One’s Own offered the life I wanted to be living if only I were a different person. I was nothing like Thalia Zepatos, heroine to a generation, rider of donkey and camel. But I wanted to be like her, to do what she had done, to go where she had gone, to have her sense of freedom and carefree yet purposeful indirection. I coveted her indifference to the narrow and directed path I’d followed, a path that was terrifying to veer off of.

  In her introduction, Zepatos asked, “Why do we wait to travel? We wait until the time is right, until the car is paid off, until the kids are grown.” None of those things were problems here. I hadn’t even begun. Unlike many of my friends, I wasn’t graduating college with a boyfriend. I didn’t have kids; my plans were tethered to exactly no one. And I certainly didn’t have a job. “We wait to feel secure and confident enough to go alone,” Zepatos continued. Her soaring next paragraph felt like a direct challenge:

  One day I decided to stop waiting and start traveling. As a woman, I had frequently challenged the restrictions others had placed on what I could do. While traveling, I challenged the limits I had placed on myself. I got tired of the way my own fears restrained my ideas of where I could go, with whom and how.