So he kept diving, and I took up the lesser “sport” of snorkeling. When I retired my regulator, I could feel Abe’s disappointment, his realization that I wasn’t that sporty girl after all but was instead the flimsy, hypochondriacal kind of girl, one who’d imagined herself getting dengue fever on at least two previous occasions and had a persistent and abiding terror of falling down the stairs.
Abe couldn’t assuage my fear because he couldn’t understand it, and he most certainly couldn’t empathize. In his mind, having weighed the risks and undertaken the precautions, scuba diving was an irrefutably safe endeavor. Those were the facts, and my irrational emotions flew in the face of them, disrupting his order. None of the other women he had dated had been afraid. Diving was meant to be a mutual pleasure, and I wasn’t living up to expectations. He judged me, and he found me wanting.
I, in return, could say that I did not like pursuits of the person I was on vacation with. Because in addition to scuba diving, there was Flashman.
Yes, it’s true. If we all liked the same books, we’d all boringly be the same people. That said, certain books can rightfully be considered deal breakers. In an essay in the New York Times Book Review, Rachel Donadio called this the Pushkin problem: “When a missed—or misguided—literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast.” Not everyone can fall for a die-hard fan of Nicholas Sparks or a James Joyce completist.
Flashman is decidedly a cult novel, which didn’t bode well. For whatever reason, when it comes to cult fiction, I’m never part of the cult. Beloved in the same way clubby Wodehouse is beloved but by fewer people, Flashman, published in 1969, is the first in a series whose subsequent titles each felt like a slap in the face (e.g., Flashman and the Redskins, Flashman’s Lady). The cover of Flashman Volume I featured a swaggering bloke in uniform with a bare-breasted maiden of “exotic” background, in, of course, the background. Sometimes you can tell a book by its cover.
Here’s what Abe loved so much: the title character, Harry Paget Flashman, a faux historical Zelig-like figure, romps across the British Empire, landing variously in Scotland, India, and Afghanistan. Sprinkled throughout are minor figures from British history—Lord Auckland, governor-general of India for a spell; Paolo di Avitabile, a governor of Peshawar province; Thomas Arnold, headmaster at the Rugby School; and the like. But the main draw is its rogue protagonist, a light dragoon and a womanizing drunkard who skips from duel to romp to “forceful seduction.” Most of the time, he frequents prostitutes, but he also enjoys raping an Afghan dancing girl. I have nothing against a good antihero, but I didn’t even enjoy hating this guy. I just wanted to get away from him.
There can certainly be pleasure in hate reading. As with The Fountainhead, I have hated my way through several books to the last page, not always out of generosity to the writer. It’s a force of will. You will be read no matter how hard you make it. Some say reading hateful books feels like time wasted—and with so little time, so many books, why bother with the bad? But there’s something bracing about reading a book you despise, because loathing is usually mixed with other emotions—fear, perverse attraction, even occasional, complicated strains of sympathy. It’s one of many reasons I believe in negative reviews. It can be interesting when a book provokes animosity. But hate in and of itself is not a very interesting response to a book, and, oh, how I hated Flashman.
My distaste didn’t ruffle Abe in the least. Sure, it was a failing on my part, but for the most part he didn’t care. This sanguinity in the face of my displeasure seemed to imply a kind of passivity or, more distressingly, an absence of passion. In the course of our relationship, I discovered William Dean Howells and read him voraciously; Abe had no interest. I read George Eliot’s Adam Bede (no interest) and Cathi Hanauer’s anthology The Bitch in the House (need I even say).
The absence of mutual engagement felt like a loss. Reading together is a way to bond. It’s nice when people like the books you like. There’s even a joy in finding someone else who hates the same book as much as you do. There were books I longed to discuss and dissect and even debate, books I would have argued about with my ex-husband in a pattern I found reassuring and rewarding. But Abe had no truck with me on any of them. When I thought about it, he didn’t really engage with me as a person at all; I was merely a foil. We were not on the same page.
And so I broke up with him. I decided to mark the rupture with a long solo road trip from the Grand Canyon, through the national parks of Utah, over to Las Vegas, where I’d never been, and then to California, where I’d follow the Pacific Coast Highway from Los Angeles to my brother Roger’s apartment in San Francisco. I would clear my head and get back to what I wanted to do. I would read whatever I wanted at night and listen in the car to whatever books I wanted by day, and make up my own company without someone else’s indifference simmering in the background. I may have had no one to talk to about any of it, but at least I had no one to make me feel bad about having no one to talk to. Four years after my divorce, I was okay with that.
Yet the breakup seemed to arouse an unfamiliar passion in Abe, who protested the entire plan. “The trip will be much better if I come along,” he insisted. He’d been to the Grand Canyon and knew how to see it. He knew the national parks. He’d bring his lightweight camping equipment and would cook gourmet meals over a Bunsen burner. He got very excited about how lightly you could camp and how well you could eat while doing so. This was another of his favorite things, and another of his favorite things that left me cold. But Abe was adamant. We should get back together and this trip would show why.
So Abe came. I regretted caving almost immediately; his lack of interest in everything from the audiobooks to the scenery to me sapped energy out of the entire endeavor. He sighed lightly as I popped in an audiobook of Edmund Morris’s controversial biography of Ronald Reagan, Dutch, wanting to hear firsthand Morris’s lightly fictionalized account, in which he, the biographer, created a stand-in character to represent himself. Had it really been a terrible decision? Discuss.
Abe had no opinion. He didn’t want to talk about the book or about Morris or about the biographer’s responsibility or the opaqueness of Ronald Reagan. Nor did Abe talk about the cacti, the Painted Desert, the monumental stone edifices of Zion National Park. Everything got swallowed up in his apathy. By the time we got to California, I was doubly sure we were over.
In San Francisco, I saw my closest friend from college, Victoria. Vic was my most sensible friend—down-to-earth, loyal, zero tolerance for pretension or condescension. She’d been one of the few people I’d known in college who wasn’t afraid to call out other people on their bullshit. That night, I pulled her aside to ask her a burning question. Vic had been on the swim team in college; she was not afraid of the water.