My Life with Bob

by Pamela Paul

  But you might not notice things either. You’re not necessarily aware of what’s going on around you. You miss things and you leave people out, and this might bother others. Some are inherently unnerved by another person reading alone, not seeing it as “I choose to read now,” but rather as “Leave me alone” or “I’m lonely.” There is something inherently melancholy about reading alone in a restaurant, for example. You get the sad looks that seem to say either “Your date didn’t show?” or “You didn’t have a date.”

  And sometimes, if you’re me, you can be so oblivious to the signals around you that you end up in trouble. This actually only happened once, but it was decisively unpleasant. I was in Florence. I had just finished a semester abroad in Paris and had a month to spend traveling northward from Rome to the Dolomite mountains. Italy is usually sunny and beautiful, but to the chagrin of the tourist industry and the tourists there that particular month, it rained during every single one of those Italian days. Because youth hostels and convents had no food service, all my meals were eaten out in restaurants and cafés, where I’d arrive alone, pathetic and sopping wet. Each time, I’d steel myself for the host’s pitying look when I requested a table for one.

  I’d allow these stares to abate before sealing my lowly status by sneaking a book out of my bag. Reading alone at a dinner table in Italy is basically against the law. At the very least, it’s culturally insensitive. Apparently, nobody there sees it as a potentially romantic gesture. No one, it seemed, imagined that the solitary reader might secretly hope that if she only read the right book alone, a handsome stranger would come along and ask, “What’s that you’re reading?” and it would all end happily ever after. Perhaps that was reserved for Audrey Hepburn.

  But you could resolve to be open to the possibility—to look up occasionally, to appear friendly, to offer an entrée into conversation, not to be such a New Yorker. This was Italy! These things happened here, at least in fiction.

  On my third day in Florence, I was deep into Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories (cliché!) over stracciatella at one of the city’s premier gelaterias, which I’d carefully selected from my battered copy of Let’s Go. (My entire budget in Italy went toward food.) As I was waiting for the rain to stop so I could visit a nearby Masaccio fresco, a dapper older gentleman with hat and briefcase approached and asked whether I minded his joining my table. Be friendly, I told myself, fighting the instinct to bury nose in book. He may not be Marcello Mastroianni, but he could be interesting to talk to. With my tentative assent, the man sat opposite me and then, without word or gesture, a larger man with his own briefcase took the seat next to him and crossed his arms as if he had a train to catch and awaited the precise hour of departure.

  The dapper older gentleman spoke fluent English. He spoke fluent French. He spoke knowledgeably about art and literature. He asked about my travels, the details of my itinerary, my background. I was flattered that someone so erudite would bother with my trifling collegiate opinions. Under the spell of his encouragement, I spoke at length. We talked about literature; we talked about art. He knew the Masaccio I wanted to see and was delighted to accompany me there. His driver—he nodded at the man next to him—would take us in his car, parked right outside. Do not worry about the rain.

  Just a quick visit to the bathroom first, I explained, watching my manners, keen to impress. On my way back to the table, a man stopped me and whispered urgently, “Run! That man has a gun.” I looked up and saw the older gentleman and his thug conferring with each other, maneuvering their briefcases.

  And then I ran. The two men got up immediately, pushing their chairs aside, and gave chase. The dapper older gentleman executed a surprisingly nimble leap into a black sedan parked outside; there was already a driver at the wheel, who gunned the engine. The thug bolted after me on foot.

  Somehow I managed to lose them, dashing into a church and hiding under a pew. I stayed there for hours, holding my breath. Only when the church filled with a group of tourists did I unfold my body and dart away. Feeling stupid and embarrassed, I didn’t go to the police. Instead, I slunk back to my youth hostel, where I confined myself to the vacant girls’ dormitory, skipping dinner altogether. What an idiot! What an easy target I’d made. That night, I woke up in a full-sweat panic attack, shaking on the bathroom floor, ready to vomit. Later, I read about Mafia teams kidnapping women to be drugged and sold into sexual slavery abroad; in all likelihood that’s what I’d narrowly escaped, if not something “milder” like ransom or rape.

  I left Florence first thing the next day. In my haste, I lost my Eurail pass on the train to Lucca. The train ticket had been a graduation gift from my father, and it hadn’t been cheap. I certainly didn’t have money to buy a new one, and I needed it to last two more months. Feeling rotten, I called him collect from a pay phone to self-flagellate and grovel and beg for another. “I thought you were calling to wish me a happy birthday,” he said. “It was yesterday.”

  I deserved to be alone.

  For a long time after that, reading by myself in public made me feel vulnerable. By highlighting my solitude, I’d made myself a mark. Here I am, come and get me, I seemed to be signposting to the wolves. I willed myself to become so outwardly tough and impenetrable that nobody would ever again mistake me for someone who was lost. “Go away,” my new body language said. “Can’t you see I’m reading?”

  The worst part was that I loved traveling independently and reading while I did it. Most of the time, I didn’t feel lost or lonely. Quite the opposite—with a truly engrossing novel, you could feel found. Reading may not always give you full access to the world around you, but it’s an entry to another world and the company of the people inside it. It’s possible to explore two worlds at once.

  Books stand out in particularly high relief when you’re traveling because during those moments of displacement they also provide a kind of mooring. It’s why our memories of what we read when we travel stick with us well after details of the trip itself fade. We remember what we read on the plane, on that beach, in that secluded cabin.

  When I look at the characters gathered in my Book of Books from my twenties, my years of solo travel and perpetual singledom, it’s hard to feel like I’d ever truly been alone. In France, I’d had Yossarian and Lucie Manette and Becky Sharp and poor Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin. I had my author friends: Gogol and Carrie Fisher and Colette and Arthur Schlesinger and Art Spiegelman. Each place was populated by its own memorable company. In Thailand there were Gabriel Oak and Bathsheba, Bartleby and Ethan Frome and Jeeves; Daniel Boorstin and Martha Gellhorn and Jack London and Edith Wharton; my fellow travelers Ian Buruma, Jan Morris, Patrick Leigh Fermor, and Pico Iyer. And so on with my subsequent travels. They provided companionship.

  Browsing through Bob’s pages, as I do when trying to recollect a moment, a feeling, an earlier incarnation of myself, I can immediately recall, for example, reading Donna Tartt’s The Secret History inside the Summer Palace of the Chinese emperor in Beijing, ignoring everything else around me—the sights, the then intensely blue sky over Beijing before smog overtook the city. My story took place inside my own invented world, one that Donna Tartt started, and that I made complete. This is where I really was. When I think back to that afternoon, what I remember is less the gold and red and blue painted bridges and the ornate gardens that surrounded me and more the rush of excitement that I felt as I accompanied Tartt’s scheming coterie of murderous college students. I carried the book with me everywhere I went in Beijing and into bed at night, following Tartt’s characters. I knew exactly where I was and I didn’t feel alone at all.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Wisdom of the Body

  In Love with a Book

  Sometimes you fall so much in love with a book that you simply have to tell everyone, to spread the love and to explain the state you’re in. You read passages aloud to anyone who will listen. You wait with bated breath, watching for signs of appreciation, wanting that smile, that laugh, that nod of reco
gnition. Please love this book too, you silently—and sometimes not so silently—urge. You become insistent, even messianic in your enthusiasm.

  And sometimes you fall in love with a person, and you’re pretty much the same way. Everyone needs to know about him and appreciate him and admire him—and you for being the one to have found him. You need the love to radiate in every possible direction. That person, more than all other people, must appreciate you and all your attendant objects of love, your stories, your authors, your characters, just as you appreciate him. So he can know you and understand you. You want to enter his secret world, and let him into yours.

  To allow someone into my Book of Books would be a true test of intimacy, and trust. There, in those pages, after all, were my fleeting passions and yearnings, my literary crushes, my love life on the page. Some of it demanded explanation. Without annotation, there was no demarking the books I’d hated from the ones I’d admired, books I’d misunderstood, books I’d disliked intensely. All of it was just laid out there, at once revealing and yet open to misinterpretation. Someone would have to really know me to understand.

  Though I’d never shown him to anyone, I’d told a few people about Bob in the past. This turned out to be a dicey proposition. Not everyone loved my Book of Books. “Tallying up books like the ticking off of accomplishments,” one boyfriend said accusingly, as if I’d admitted to quantifying parental love or indexing my inner beauty. “Hurry up, go note it in Bob,” he’d gibe every time I closed a book, as if the act of recording invalidated the entire experience. Were the books truly being read for their own sake or in pursuit of some goal that sullied the entire enterprise?

  “What does this tell you if you don’t remember anything about the books themselves?” another beau asked, suggesting an expanded Bob with a page for my impressions of each book in its stead. This Bigger Bob lasted for two books, the relationship not much longer. “You’re not seriously going to allow books on tape, are you?” wondered a third, scornfully. Competition, jealousy, misunderstandings, risk. Perhaps it wasn’t worth the bother.

  It wasn’t until my midtwenties, when I’d met the person I would marry, that I truly opened Bob up to someone else. I had never been one of the girls who’d always had a boyfriend; the right guys always seemed to be with someone else. I ended up with the wrong guys, the ones who didn’t get me or whom I didn’t get, and we usually broke up hastily as a consequence.

  This guy was different. There was nothing to prove to him; he loved me for who I was. He loved me no matter what. And I knew he would love Bob, too. There was no way he would be put off by my Book of Books because he was unquestionably much better read; moreover, he actually remembered what he read. Here was someone who had actually finished his Plato and Hobbes and Locke; for him, the Norton Anthology was a footnote. Marrying him would be like uploading an entirely new database to my brain.

  When we met, I was reading Sherwin Nuland’s surgeon’s-eye view of human biology, The Wisdom of the Body. Bodies were on my mind because at that time, by some terrible misunderstanding, I’d been put to work on the Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar—without doubt, a professional nadir.

  I was twenty-six, living in Brooklyn, and had just started working at Time Inc. with great expectation, leaping from the child’s playpen of Scholastic Inc.’s downtown headquarters, where I’d worked for three years, to the big-boys’ club in the midtown Time-Life Building. After all my angsting over what to do with my life, I’d wound up moving back from Thailand to New York, abandoning a plan to switch over to Hong Kong, and taking a half-editorial, half-marketing job in publishing when it materialized during a pre-Internet visit to my old stomping ground, the college alumni services office. Miraculously, this job paid well enough that I could afford to live with just one roommate in the East Village, which was possible back when you could rent a room in Manhattan for four hundred dollars a month.

  Bob returned to New York with me, and his pages began to fill with stories signifying that I was Home. Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (my penchant for dark reading alive and brooding), H. L. Mencken’s My Life as Author and Editor, Money by Martin Amis, and Dorothy Parker’s short story “Big Blonde” helped inform the kind of urban life I wanted to live and the kind I hoped to avoid. (“Please let me never be Big Blonde,” was one recurring thought.) Asia could still be visited in books, but I was living in New York City, no longer a mecca but mine, and I wanted to be fully there.

  The publishing division I signed up for at Time Inc. was charged with creating books based on the company’s venerable quarry of magazines. I envisioned myself assembling handsome pictorial histories of World War II from the pages of Time, sifting dreamily through the photographic archives of Life and writing elegant and elegiac captions for each entry in the sumptuous coffee table books I’d help produce.

  What actually happened was that I, the least sportif person within a twelve-block radius of the Time-Life Building, was assigned to work on Sports Illustrated. Not only that, I was put on the swimsuit calendar. It wasn’t even a book.

  My team consisted of three people. Jack, my boss, was blond, chipper, blue-suited, and sporty, the most all-American person I’d ever met. One of the photo editors we worked with was a European named Guillermo and every time Jack gamely addressed him, it came out differently: “Gwermo.” “Gallermo.” “Germo.” Charlotte, the third person on the team, was unnervingly efficient; she had a system and color-coded pattern for everything. I struggled to ape her every move. “Wait, what are the purple thumbtacks for?” “Do you use the five-by-seven index cards for the B48 mailing, or the four-by-six?” (Later, I learned that she sorted Tupperware as a stress-reducing activity—try it!) The rest of my work there was not nearly as inspiring.

  Luckily, I’d found a new source of inspiration. I met him through a graphic designer who’d worked on publications we’d each been editing, across town, in different offices. (“He talks so lovingly about his mother!” she enthused.) It was my first ever head-over-heels, totally irrational, and irresponsible relationship. The moment he proposed, I accepted with an immediate and giddy yes. He lived on the Upper West Side and I lived in Carroll Gardens, I had two cats and he was violently allergic, he was about to move to London for grad school and I had a brand-new job in New York—but the how and the when of the happily-ever-after was mere detail. For the first time in my life, I didn’t care how everything would be arranged. It just would.

  In that moment, both heady and earthy at once, it felt right to be reading a book called The Wisdom of the Body, an appropriate subject for the early days of a relationship. Sherwin Nuland’s follow-up to his bestselling How We Die toured the reader through the human body from the nervous system to the digestive system and, of course, the heart. Everything seemed to point to the same place. Citing Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry,” Nuland wrote, “Without imagination of another’s mind there can be no understanding of that other and therefore no love.” He was talking about us. Everything was about us. I was in thrall to my own heart, reason be damned.

  Weirdly, the part of the book I most remember sharing in this besotted state was a harrowing passage about a third-place beauty pageant winner who’d eaten too much pork and had an unlikely adverse reaction. “She was throwing herself around the gurney and shouting for help—evidently not fully conscious…” And later, “The pattern of blotch and pallor involved every visible inch of body and was much deeper in its purplishness than I had ever encountered, except on the freshly dead.” I read it to my fiancé as we lay on a futon on the floor of his apartment, and we both shrieked in horror and fascination. He got everything.

  The second he asked me to go with him to London, abandoning my cats to the mercy of a stranger and giving up my two-bedroom Brooklyn floor-through with working fireplace for only a thousand dollars a month and blowing my nascent publishing career out the window, I said, “Let’s go!” One lesson I�
�d gleaned from living in Thailand was that everything would be there when I got back. And until then, who cared? There was only time with him and the time until I would next be with him; I could hardly see where I was going.

  Just a week before, my colleague Charlotte had given notice too. Her husband, a banker, was being relocated to London. With both of us leaving him in the lurch in the span of a month to cross the Atlantic, Jack looked like he didn’t know what hit him.

  So what? I was in love! Other people’s suffering was of no consequence; everything would surely make its way to a happy ending. Within weeks I was living in Tony Blair’s New Britannia, spending my days walking and biking around the city, sitting on park benches reading English literature and eating curry takeaway. We Chunneled to Paris for a weekend so I could show him off to the Mathieus for their approval. “Très beau,” Carole and Bertrand agreed. “But you need to do something about his French.” At night, he and I lay in bed reading Down and Out in Paris and London, first he, then I, then both of us reading sections aloud to each other, laughing, grimacing, commiserating, fans of everything Orwell and seemingly everything else, perfectly in sync.

  At night, we curled up on the sofa in our little duplex in Fulham (London being far more affordable then), just across the bridge from Putney, which would later figure so vividly in Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall. We’d turn off the overhead, light a few candles, and play audiobooks—Heart of Darkness and The Hobbit—on a small portable stereo, pretending we were in an earlier radio age, listening to serialized stories in the dark. He didn’t object to audiobooks being entered in Bob.

  We loved stories about the perfidy of man and gusty adventures at sea. Melville and Conrad were our cornerstones: Billy Budd, Sailor and the sinister treachery and vengeance of Benito Cereno. We took turns reading Lord Jim. I told him about my favorite Conrad story, “The Secret Sharer,” and my dream of one day writing a screenplay adaptation, and he took me seriously. He introduced me to Darkness at Noon, and on his recommendation I read Angle of Repose, and we bonded over the cold, enclosed prisons of Stalin’s gulag and the hard, spare plains of Wallace Stegner’s American West.