We may not have gotten ourselves married off to Sting or Simon Le Bon, but we considered them part of our lives, earning us cultural passports out of the high school world where we were ignored by the popular girls in their capacious Champion sweatshirts (overpriced, essential) and Silver City Pink lipstick. We could dip into the milieu we read about in Spy magazine as long as nobody else (our parents) knew about it. If only the other kids at school could know.
Tristate-area alumni know how terrible it is to be merely New York–ish when, inside, you feel like a New Yorker. The City was only forty minutes away and yet so far from the minds of my classmates. How could you not want to at least read about it?
Something had to be done, and luckily, someone had made the senseless error of putting me in a leadership position in a key high school organization. The Human Relations Committee sounds like a nefarious political lobby but was actually an extracurricular activity that had some kind of ineffable touchy-feely purpose. The nature of this purpose remained elusive to me and my coleaders, two attractive and more socially adept classmates; I had an unrequited crush on the arty one and spent copious amounts of time vacillating wildly between the conviction that he knew all about my crush and the certainty that he had no clue about my true feelings. He was either totally mortified to even be liked by me or secretly in love with me too. I could never be sure. What did I know about human relations?
And what was Human Relations? How had we landed these roles? Did we even have a faculty advisor? Unclear. As best I understood it, we were to convene a handpicked sample of twenty-five students every month from each stratum of high school society for a day of interclique bonding at the local public library. It was like The Breakfast Club, but without Judd Nelson and not a movie.
In a quixotic effort to make my high school classmates more book—and Manhattan—aware and because we met in the library, which was my turf (also to impress the arty one), I decided one of the group’s activities would be a read-aloud. I chose the reading, and it was always the same: Slaves of New York.
Tama Janowitz had recently published the book, her debut collection of stories, with a blurb on the back from Andy Warhol that said, “Great! Sizzling! Wow!” Janowitz, with her bushel of black hair, wide apple cheeks, and tiny beak of a nose, had read parts of the book aloud on Andy Warhol’s 15 Minutes with great panache, in a mocking, deadpan voice dripping with insouciance. I taped the episode and watched it over and over, studying her delivery. She was the coolest author I’d ever seen and she deserved a wider audience. She would also prove to my audience that I was cool just for reading her.
Because oversight of the HRC was minimal to nonexistent, I was able to force my group of twenty-five peers each month into a circle and read to them from Janowitz’s “Case History N4: Fred,” aping her unassailable nonchalance, her unforced charm, her indifference to resolved endings. She didn’t care what anyone thought and, dammit, I’d pretend I didn’t either.
The story had a killer opening: “Fred had a problem: he liked to approach strange girls on the street and offer to take them shopping at Tiffany’s.” As I read, I watched everyone’s face to make sure they were registering the appropriate level of appreciation. The story was only three pages long; even so, I made a few judicious cuts. My classmates didn’t need to know he was an out-of-work musician who lived near the Williamsburg Bridge, for example. But there were key parts, like this exchange:
“To his surprise, he found himself saying, ‘Listen, I like your linear definition. I was wondering—just for the hell of it—would you let me take you shopping at Tiffany’s? It would give me a great deal of pleasure, and naturally I wouldn’t expect payment of any kind.’
“The girl looked at him and said, ‘Buzz off.’”
That was it. End of activity. There was no discussion of the story, of what it meant, of its relevance, of why I’d decided to read it to a bunch of kids from school. I conducted the reading like a sermon. Why a teacher or librarian didn’t question this practice I have never understood. In my mind, I was performing a service: Here is what you need to know. And moreover, This is what I wish you knew about me. Or knew that I know.
It was my inchoate way of declaring to the rest of my high school classmates where I stood. Ericka and I and a few other friends didn’t fit neatly into any one group. We were more like floaters, and even among the floaters, I didn’t have any defining characteristic; there was no part for me in the John Hughes lineup. Everyone else had some kind of identity—the lacrosse player, the theater person, the hot arty guy, the popular one, the popular one who’s also a good student—part of me wanted to stake out mine: book person.
A book person was someone who knew things other kids didn’t. She knew about culture and art, about literary alliances and feuds, about writers who had made it, writers who were on the cusp, and writers who had fallen out of favor. She knew which books mattered.
A book person had her own sources and understood the use of imagination. By declaring yourself a book person, you could make your fellow students aware that you were privy to another dimension of the world, and so the slights in their world—not having a boyfriend or not getting invited to a party or not having the right sweatshirt or not achieving a certain rank in the suburban hierarchy—didn’t matter. You were part of something else.
I had not yet made the transition from thinking that everything in a book was true and good to being a discriminating or even a mildly skeptical reader. I didn’t question whether the urban life depicted in the books I deemed sophisticated and desirable was in fact a happy one, with depth or consequence. Instead, I hoovered it all up into the vacuum of my mind. I felt ahead of the game, convinced that if only I read enough books, I would have everything I needed for the life I wanted, both aware and unaware of how little I really knew.
CHAPTER 3
The Trial
A Book with No Ending
I was supposed to be asleep. Instead I was reading The Trial on the sly, camped out in a dorm bed in rural France, hiding my book under the covers like a forbidden telephone after hours. I turned the pages quickly but quietly, desperate to know the ending but for nobody to know I was even awake. I was missing all my classes and let everyone think I was sick, but the truth was I had jet lag and a hangover. I was seventeen, this was my first time abroad, and it turned out I was a big baby when it came to switching time zones.