Flashman is one of those books, and had I known that, I could have saved myself a lot of time and romantic trouble. If only it had carried a warning sign: anyone who really likes this book isn’t the guy for you. As soon as I read my new boyfriend Abe’s copy, early in our relationship, I should have realized we were doomed. But I was in denial. After a period of gloomy postdivorce abstinence, I’d begun dating again, sorrowfully at first, and then, a few briskly aborted relationships later, with gusto. Having already met and parted ways with the One, I was eager to meet the Next One.
Abe could be it. He was ridiculously handsome and well educated and appealing. Mostly he was handsome, and I was attracted to him in a way that felt slightly unwholesome from the moment I stole him from one of my friends. To be fair, she was more a colleague than a friend (or does that make it less fair?). To be fairer, they had broken up months earlier, and she said she was “totally over it.” She even had a new boyfriend. (She never spoke to me again.)
I already felt guilty because my interest in Abe dated to the time when the two of them were still going strong. Whenever I’d been their third wheel, I would eye him covetously, persuaded that he was surreptitiously eyeing me, too. Generally, when I have this kind of fantasy, it’s precisely that—a fantasy. I’ll think someone is looking at me with flirtatious intent and meanwhile he’s thinking something like You look like my aunt Sylvie or Do you always play with your hair? But for once, with Abe, the wishful thinking was real. Several months after he and my friend/colleague broke up, he called. “I’ve wanted to do this for a long time,” he said.
With a PhD and a law degree and I’m pretty sure one other random master’s, he was about six times better educated than I was. He basically had a graduate degree for every time I had even momentarily pondered and rejected the idea of going to grad school. Surely he knew good things to read, I thought. In retrospect, those multiple academic credentials should have caused some alarm.
Abe had lots of books about philosophy and law and taxes and scuba diving and outdoor camping cookery. For fiction, he liked the kind of masculine books I think of as naughty-upper-class-Brit lit, the type of novels typically described as “ribald” and “infamous” and “jolly good fun.” George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman Papers series is also, let it be noted, a favorite of British bad boys Boris Johnson and Jeffrey Archer.
But I picked up his copy of the first Flashman in good spirit, wanting to like what my new boyfriend liked. I had already read one book by Fraser (not part of the cultish Flashman Papers), a yellowed paperback languishing in a guesthouse in western China. For several days it had been my sole reading companion, and this had robbed me of any desire to pick up another Fraser until I met Abe. Still, I needed to believe in second chances.
Flashman came with us to Belize, where Abe was initiating me into another of his preferred leisure activities, deep-sea diving. Given my troubled relationship with sports (my college application essay had been about my struggle with gym), this did not bode well. But I had fallen into that deceptive If you love this then I must love this because I might love you thinking. I would like Abe’s books and his sports, because that’s the kind of game, good sport gal I was. I had never even thought about scuba diving before, so at least I wasn’t bad at it.
But scuba diving, I soon learned, is dangerous—as in, life threatening. Typically, the sharks and the boats and the storms and the poisonous eels aren’t what kill you. It’s your own body that does you in. The premise of scuba-diving education is that the more you read about it, the more you understand what can go wrong, the more likely you are to avoid making fatal errors underwater.
This was not my process. The more I read about scuba diving, the more frightened I got. According to the manual, you could dive too deep and too long, accumulate too much nitrogen in your body and come down with a case of nitrogen narcosis, like inhaling a megadose of laughing gas at the dentist, but not funny. You could lose your capacity for judgment and swim off oblivious into the deep sea forever. Then there was oxygen toxicity, “the bends”—just about the worst name ever given to a sports affliction with the possible exception of cauliflower ear. You could vomit underwater and you could vomit above water. You could vomit into your regulator (the device you breathe through) or your regulator could break altogether. You could bid farewell to your middle ear.
Other things could go wrong, and I contemplated all of them. If something terrible happens undersea and you panic like a normal person, you can’t flee like a normal person. Instead, you have to rise methodically through the water at regular intervals (requiring math) to prevent nitrogen from proliferating in your bloodstream. Worst outcome? Death.
I tried to focus on wowing Abe with my athletic derring-do and how much I was going to love scuba diving if I didn’t die. When I suppressed all of my natural anxieties and fine-tuned fears, I did end up loving it. At forty feet below, you can viscerally appreciate that the earth’s topography doesn’t stop at the water’s edge, but continues and even amplifies below the surface. Mountains, canyons, grooved crevasses, and tunnels open before you. Schools of fish envelop you in their shimmery cumulative mass. Moray eels bray silently from within their coral cocoons, their massive jaws forming silent O’s. Here is your access to a private H. G. Wellsian fantasia of half-impossible creatures.
I was fine! I didn’t vomit. I didn’t even feel like vomiting. It was hard to understand why anyone would vomit until about four days into our vacation, when someone else on our boat felt like vomiting and proceeded to do so violently and determinedly all over the boat floor and into the surrounding ocean as we hurtled toward that morning’s destination. Nausea, of course, has a social element, which is one of many reasons no one likes to watch someone else throw up. You sympathize and then you empathize and then you join in.
This is nauseating? I remember thinking for a split second, watching the hapless passenger spew at my feet. My next thought was, This is nauseating. When we arrived at our diving destination, it felt insane to sink five feet below the surface to wait things out as you’re supposed to (bobbing on the wavy surface, being, of course, nauseating). Everything in my consciousness fought against it. This is unnatural! And that was the end of my scuba-diving career. Spooked, I didn’t want to dive anymore, and Abe couldn’t understand why not. He had zero empathy.