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.