None of this was really about the books. But under the circumstances, it was hard to enjoy what I was reading anymore, at least not in the same way. Already I was changing. My Book of Books had begun to reflect my husband’s interests, deliberately so. I wanted to know what he knew. I wanted our minds to align in a way that reflected our hearts. His books would be mine, too, part of our shared life. That’s not entirely what happened.
Nonfiction, where our disagreements were more starkly exposed, was even worse than fiction. Any book could set us at odds, and did. Read Modern Times, the defining road map to the twentieth century, my husband urged me; then I would understand his worldview. I’d had some previous Paul Johnson experience, having been suckered into the History Book-of-the-Month Club in high school the way normal kids signed up for Columbia House Records. Johnson’s Intellectuals was part of my ninety-nine-cent first shipment. Completely unaware of his politics, I’d read each essay in a state of growing confusion. Why was Johnson taking down each of these venerated philosophers? What did he have against Rousseau?
Still, I ventured into my husband’s Modern Times blushingly na?ve. I didn’t know about Johnson’s slavish Thatcherism, his ardent defense of Nixon, his admiration for Pinochet, or the way he overtly manipulated historical fact to suit his political disposition. Here, I assumed, would be a useful brush-up on twentieth-century Europe.
Now that I was reading Johnson as a somewhat older, more sophisticated reader, one who’d actually studied European history in college (maybe having learned something after all), it came through quite clearly on the page. How was it possible my husband liked this guy? Johnson, I worried, was telling me something I didn’t want to know about the man I was in love with. Was it possible I didn’t know him at all?
That’s when I started reading behind his back. And Bob began to tell a different story, one populated by books that made an alternate case. These were books my husband had no interest in, books that perhaps opposed his interests. One day, browsing in Hatchards in Piccadilly Circus (the best London bookstore, btw), I came upon an essay in a Christopher Hitchens collection in which Hitchens described with gleeful and damning detail Johnson’s drunken boorishness and general despicability. Hitchens recalled watching Johnson bully a female foreign editor at the New Statesman. Here’s Hitchens’s description of Johnson:
“Don’t listen to her, she’s a Communist!” he kept bellowing, his face twisted and puce with drink. “Fascist bitch!” he finally managed, before retiring to a sofa on the other side of the room and farting his way through a fitful doze for the rest of the meal.
Hitchens had proved my case: Johnson was no authority. Read Modern Times, my husband had urged me; then I would understand. Now I feared I understood too much.
In any case, all this sleuthing was for naught. One of the worst aspects of arguing with my husband was that he unfailingly emerged victorious. Whereas my own memory was a dismal chamber of half-forgotten, half-thought-out notions that leaked precipitously, my husband’s was well stocked and airtight. Nothing fell out. He knew everything, or at least everything that proved him right. Mention Poland, and he could describe the country’s nineteenth-century history in detail; bring up Kentucky, and he had the name of every senator who had represented the state at the ready. Every single word he read he absorbed, digested with a cogent point of view, formulated into persuasive arguments, and then filed where it could be accessed at a moment’s notice, and, it seemed, used against me.
This remarkable retention initially filled me with awed admiration. Here was someone I could learn from, like having my own private library of a husband. “Click on him!” was a running joke among his friends when one of them had trouble remembering a fact or date. And now here he was, by my side, entirely clickable. But over time, my enthused approval congealed into an unattractive envy and, later still, a rage at him and a loathing for myself. How unfair that I didn’t share this skill, and what an asshole he could be when he used it so effectively against me.
It was just the two of us. We had few friends in London. Exceedingly efficient Charlotte had arrived from Time Inc. only a few weeks before me, and was already pregnant and working at Condé Nast; she and her husband lived perfectly in Chelsea with a ready-set crowd of professional expats who hosted well-orchestrated dinner parties. My husband’s new friends were a ragtag group of twenty-two-year-old grad students who wanted to talk about what they needed to study that night. I felt out of place in both worlds, neither student nor employee.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t an easy way to meet other people. Without official working papers, finding a full-time position at an actual company was a legal impossibility. The only loophole for an American was to prove that no one else in the European Union could do the job. With only a few years’ media experience under my belt, I could hardly pretend. Would-be employers at various Time Warner affiliates shrugged their shoulders helplessly.
Outside of job interviews, everyone assumed I was a housewife. Utility workers unfailingly addressed me as Missus and they weren’t far off the mark. Much of my day was spent food shopping, gym going, and household tending. My husband had a little money, so I could afford not to work. Don’t worry about it, he reassured me; after all, I was the one who’d had to quit a job to move to London. Having worked since I was fourteen and risen to the dubious title of “marketing manager” (yet another reason to ditch the Time Inc. job), I felt gratitude, guilt, discomfort, defensiveness, relief, fear, anxiety, and a growing sense of indolence. I roasted lamb chops.
On the bright side and for the first time in my life, I managed to land actual freelance work as a writer and editor, and was even paid small amounts of money for the privilege. After meeting a couple of editors at the Economist and sweating through a tryout, I was given a small monthly column on global arts trends. I could hardly believe my good fortune. Slightly less luckily but far more lucratively, I started editing internal publications for McKinsey, the global consulting firm and a place where nearly everyone wrote in jargon using English as a second language.