A Jane Austen Education(11)

I was talking with one of those friends one day around this time. She was an old girlfriend from college, someone I knew I had not been very nice to back in the day, and she was telling me about one of her other friends, how she’d been feeling lately that they were no longer as intimate as they once had been. As I listened to her talk about a relationship that had clearly been far closer than any I had ever experienced, I started to get more and more agitated, until I finally had to break in. “Well,” I demanded, “what does intimacy mean?” It wasn’t a rhetorical question. I suddenly realized that it was terribly important, and that I didn’t know. And then, with the most plaintive sense of bewilderment and loss—as if there were this giant thing out there that had been going on for years that I’d just discovered I was totally missing out on but had no clue how to find—I added, “Are we intimate? Is this intimacy, what we’re having right now?” I really had no idea, but the look on her face said it all. “You poor bastard,” it told me. “Of course we’re not. Of course this isn’t.”

Well, it just sat there, that realization, like a lump in my gut—sat there for weeks. I didn’t know what to do with it, how to get rid of it, how to dig myself out of the hole I’d just discovered I was in. But I knew that I couldn’t live like that anymore. By the end of the school year, I gathered up the courage to talk to my girlfriend and tell her that we had to break up. Even if I was beginning to understand what a real relationship should look like, we still didn’t have very much in common, and besides, I had botched this one so badly there was no way to start over. (In fact, she had figured out that we needed to break up a long time before I did and was just as relieved to be done with it.) Being alone wasn’t going to be easy after such a long time, but I knew that if I was ever going to get anywhere as a human being, that would have to be the first step. Or no, that wasn’t the first step. The first step had been reading Emma.





CHAPTER 2

pride and prejudice growing up

Those first years in graduate school, I lived in a dingy little university apartment that I shared with a random series of business students who’d been assigned to the same space. They would go to corporate-sponsored happy hours and come back flushed with cocktails and job prospects, or bring their friends back to the apartment and whoop it up in front of the TV. I’d hole up in my room, burrowing like a hamster. And quite a little den it was. My desk was a slab of wood over two filing cabinets; my bed was a pancaked old futon that I rolled right out on the floor. A hard chair, a narrow bookcase, a secondhand computer—that was pretty much it. I would sleep till noon, then stay up reading until four or five in the morning, blocking the glare from the security lights in the airshaft with an old woolen blanket that hung from a couple of nails I had pounded into the window frame. When it was time for my 3:00 A.M. dinner of ramen noodles or English-muffin pizza, I’d wait a few seconds after turning on the kitchen light, to give the roaches a chance to hide.

I was in my late twenties, in other words, and still living like a college student. I was having trouble growing up—one of the reasons, in fact, that I’d gone back to school in the first place. I’d been out in the world for a few years, had had a couple of jobs, but I still hadn’t learned how to cope with life on my own. Simple things, like buying a bottle of shampoo, would make me catatonic with confusion. I’d stand there in the store with the bottle in my hand like a sleepwalker who had just woken up, wondering how I had gotten there and what I was supposed to do next. Yes, right, I would think. You’ve come in here because you need this. To wash your hair. Now go to the front of the store and pay for it.

If I was having trouble becoming an adult, it wasn’t a big surprise. As the youngest in a family of three kids—and the youngest by a lot, almost six years—I had always been treated like the baby. My mother was very loving and supportive—I was “her” child, the one who looked like her and reminded her of her own adored father—yet she also tended to infantilize me. But the more important presence was my father, the figure who dominated the household. Simultaneously demanding and undermining, he infantilized me without being loving and supportive. He expected everything, but he gave me the unmistakable message that he didn’t really think I could do anything.

In retrospect, it’s clear that he was haunted by a sense of financial and even physical insecurity. He and his parents had been refugees from World War II, having escaped from Europe—that is, from the Holocaust—at the last possible moment. Much of his family had not escaped, and although he had erased his Czech accent by sheer force of will, he was still profoundly marked by his early experiences. He never spent a dime he didn’t have to, never threw away so much as a paper clip. With us he was not only stern and withholding, a shouter and hitter who demanded top grades, he was also overprotective to the point of being overbearing.

He didn’t want his sons to take risks or explore options or strike out on our own; he wanted us to follow the plan that he’d laid out for us: major in science—he was an engineer himself—go to medical school, and start earning a living as quickly as possible. Don’t waste time, don’t get distracted. The world was a dangerous place, and the fewer wrong turns you made, the better. He’d figured out what you needed to do to ensure yourself a secure life, and there was no point in our figuring it out all over again for ourselves.