“Well,” I said, “I’m going to take this job I just got offered at Dance Teacher magazine, otherwise known as a surefire route to fame, so I guess you must be very proud.”
In college, I had openly mocked friends who wasted a perfectly good Saturday of hungover pizza to sit for the GRE on purpose. I didn’t need grad school. I’d be doing just fine in the real world of Dance Teacher magazine, thank you very much—where, it turned out, all anyone wanted to talk about was carbohydrates, and I was abjectly miserable.
Thanks to my actor boyfriend, at least, I’d managed a convenient financial workaround to the incommensurability of twenty-eight-thousand-dollar salaries with a culture where that is how much people spend for their nanny’s Pilates instruction—that is, he allowed me to live rent-free, after landing a lead role in a very funny (and underappreciated) movie I’ll call Four Dipshits Go Abroad. And he also worked in an all-expense-paid trip to visit him on the set—which was in Prague, which according to my 1995 artisanal travel journal was my very favorite place in the world. I hadn’t yet earned my annual one-week vacation at Dance Teacher, but I talked my boss into letting me go anyway under the pretense that it was a networking trip for the magazine.
“I’ll see if any of the stars were dancers. Maybe we can get a cover,” I lied.
When I arrived, I got a ride to the set in a chauffeured town car. That day, they were shooting in an abandoned Soviet army barracks outside of town that had been made to look even shittier to fill in for Bratislava (actually a lovely city, but hey). I shared the car with my boyfriend’s seventeen-year-old costar, who had been a professional actress since the age of four, was currently known worldwide for playing the younger sister of a famous, let’s say, zombie killer, and who, I learned in short order, hated the ethereally beautiful city’s cobblestones, spires, and mist-haunted alleys, gave exactly no shits about medieval, baroque, or Jugendstil architecture, and who had never heard of Franz Kafka. “I heard you love Prague,” she said by way of greeting.
“I do!” I said.
“Hmm,” she said, wrinkling her telegenic nose. “Can I ask why?”
I had never heard of anyone not liking Prague before, and I had also never had a conversation in a town car with someone famous before, so I went momentarily blank.
“Well,” I said, “it’s a wonderful city if you, um, like architecture. And literature. And art.”
“And cobblestones,” she said.
“Yes, and cobblestones.”
“I hate cobblestones,” she said. “My Jimmy Choos always get stuck in them.”
I looked down at my own shoes, grimy silver no-name flats from Urban Outfitters that had a hole in one of the soles.
“I miss L.A. so much,” she said, as she opened an envelope that contained the script for her next project and inhaled deeply. “Ah,” she said, “it still smells like L.A.!” This was meant as a compliment.
By the time I’d arrived in the Golden City—my boyfriend’s setup was a plush apartment at the InterContinental with twenty-four-hour room service and five-star gym access, so pretty much in Kafka’s old house—this teenager had established herself as the alpha of the set. But, lack of appreciation for medieval city planning aside, I thought she was sweet—plus, especially for her age, she was eerily prescient. For example, as we took turns bowling atrociously at a cast-and-crew party, she took me by the head and said: “You’re so pretty!” Granted, this was definitely said in a be nice to the nonthreatening fat girl sort of way. I was the heaviest I have ever been (when not also housing another human being), after many weeks working late into the night on deadline at Dance Teacher, shoving down potato-chip-crusted mac and cheese from Vynl diner at my desk. But still. A celebrity says you’re pretty and you say, “Thank you!”
Then she looked at me very seriously. “What do you want to do with your life?”
I reminded her that I was already an adult, and already doing things with my life. “I’m the associate editor of Dance Teacher magazine.”
She batted the words away as soon as they left my mouth. “No,” she said. “What do you really want to do?” I was left speechless by a child star who hated everything I loved (including, I suspected, my boyfriend).
On the plane back to the States, I got to thinking that she had a point. What was I doing with my life? When I wasn’t getting fat at Dance Teacher and piggybacking onto my boyfriend’s comparatively high-rolling lifestyle, I was moonlighting for an ad-reporting company, writing inane trivia questions about One Tree Hill to trick bored housewives into giving away their valuable demographic information. (By the way, I love One Tree Hill.) I’d finished my M.F.A. and was putting it to excellent use working seventy hours a week pummeling my mind into numbness.
The child star who said “literally” a lot was right, goddammit. I needed to make a change. After twenty-six years of insisting to anyone who would listen (and many who wouldn’t) that I was above studying and trying—that my natural “gifts,” whatever those were, required no effort-based bolstering—in preparation for my trip to the Prague set of Dipshits, I’d recently decided to start thumbing back through my German copies of Kafka for fun. To my shock, despite the fact that I hadn’t had a real German conversation in nearly a decade, I could more or less understand “Das Urteil” (“The Judgment”) in its entirety, from the first description of the spring day to the gross naked dad jumping up on the bed to last macabre quasi joke about “endless intercourse.”
This time, with a little help from my yellowing compact Freshman Achievement Award dictionary, I didn’t just understand the story; I saw it. I saw Georg Bendemann’s blithe face as he finished a letter to his friend in Russia and went to check on his dad, totally unaware that this conversation would be his last on earth. I smelled the mustiness of Herr Bendemann’s room. I felt the sting (metaphorical though it was) of a father calling his son an “evil human being,” and then “sentencing” him to death. Sure, it hurt my noggin a little bit to squint through Kafka’s sometimes-endless sentence construction, where you have no idea what things are really about until, after what seem like endless clauses and commas, a verb is finally reached. But every time I read a passage, it was like I got … better at reading the one after it. Like, smarter or something. And it was challenging, sure—but that challenge was enjoyable. Wait, was I a book dork? I was a book dork. And I needed to own my book-dorkdom and do something befitting it. Something like, maybe, reading “Das Urteil” in a more institutional setting.
So I started researching graduate programs in the New York area—but most of them required the GRE. And I mean, math? I don’t want to be one of those I’m a woman and I’m bad at math women, because I was excellent at math in high school, but I hadn’t so much as thought about math since Dylan Gellner “helped” me with physics in high school (an excuse to go into his bedroom on school nights). But one graduate program in New York, a terminal M.A. in “Humanities and Social Thought” at NYU, merely “recommended” the GRE (Nein danke!), and the students seemed to be able to take any course they wanted across the entire university and call it a program. This program also—surprise of surprises—didn’t offer any financial aid. I said, Sign me up! More school! More student loans, please! They will be inconsequential, because my boyfriend is famous now and he will go from comparatively rich to rich-rich and pay everything off, because he is just that nice of a guy! I need more time with “Das Urteil,” and I need it now! I didn’t really know what people did with terminal M.A. degrees in Humanities and Social Thought, but I figured I’d sort it all out later when I was many thousands of dollars poorer, but a better humanist and social thinker.
I celebrated my acceptance to the program by quitting Dance Teacher and upping my hours as a professional TV watcher to near full-time. That way I’d have more time during the day to study, and to concentrate on taking the next step: applying for Ph.D. programs. What better way to cement the choice to go back to school than to make another choice to go to many, many more years of school? I mean, why not, right? (Besides the fact that I would, at last, have to take that fucking GRE.) Sure, it would mean an infinite amount of years outside of the workforce. But I had a plan. Even if my boyfriend didn’t pay off my student loans as a Flag Day present, I would surely regain solvency when my screenplay/novel/one-woman show/general creative-genius-whatever “hit.” I mean, sure, I wasn’t working on any of those things, but once I was free of the tyranny and vacuity of carbs conversations, it was only a matter of time.
I also applied to Ph.D. programs because of my favorite M.A. professor, Professor Singh, who taught a Theories of Citizenship course in which I had become acquainted with the political philosophy of a bunch of Germans: Kant, Hegel, Walter Benjamin, even Carl Schmitt, whose “paradox of sovereignty” so resembled the Bush Doctrine that the obscure philosopher, whose works were at the time largely unavailable in English, was enjoying a brief vogue. (This would result in a highly unfortunate crop of dissertations that would be irrelevant by the time they were defended in 2013, as opposed to most other dissertations, which are of utmost relevance.) Because of my recent adventures in Kafka reimmersion, I knew the original language all these Germans wrote in. And so, I figured that a Ph.D. in German was just the kind of obscure credential that would give a quirky future screenwriter/playwright/novelist/person-who-had-done-none-of-these-things just the kind of heady credentials she needed to distinguish herself from the hordes of other dubious hyphenates in a profession that I hadn’t invented yet. My knowledge of German, plus my legitimate interest in Walter Benjamin, G. W. F. Hegel, Jürgen Habermas, und so fort, made me an immediate favorite of Professor Singh, who heartily encouraged me to apply for real graduate school.
“You absolutely must go for a Ph.D.,” he said at his office hours one day, as I talked him into letting me write a paper about Walter Benjamin and “Before the Law” (I had impressed everyone in my class by being able to read this in the original). “You are made for this. Made for it.”
Nobody had ever said that about me before in relation to anything.
But five (or more) years of school—I couldn’t imagine how much that would cost.
“What do you mean, cost?” asked Professor Singh. “Ph.D.s are fully funded.”
Wait, five (or more) years where someone else would pay me to read Kafka all day?
“I mean, it’s not very much money,” Singh continued. “Pathetic pittance, really. And you have to teach a class.”
Wait, five (or more) years, where someone else would pay me to talk about Kafka all day with impressionable young people? Done and done.
What came after those five years I neither knew nor cared, because like most twenty-eight-year-olds living in New York and trying to be “creative,” I did not have a long-range plan, and indeed viewed anyone who did as a soul-munching Wall Street automaton with one foot in the grave and the other on his godforsaken lawn in Westchester. I would figure it out when I had to, obviously. Even as I applied, the idea of being a German professor as a permanent career—which, by the way, is the sole career for which one is preparing by getting a doctorate in German—barely crossed my mind. I had liked my college German professors fine. But I certainly didn’t want to be them, what with having to read Theodor Fontane on purpose (he’s the world’s most boring “realist,” so I guess the best one?), actually know how relative pronouns work, and live somewhere boring and gross. I would apply to exactly five Ph.D. programs, none of which were located somewhere boring and gross: NYU, Columbia, and then three in or near Los Angeles, as my boyfriend had just been cast in a pilot and was gearing up to move there.
Unfortunately, NYU and Columbia were both unimpressed. The only universities that wanted anything to do with me were in California, and they both flew me out on all-expenses-paid campus visits. Wooing is, indeed, standard practice in graduate school recruitment, which makes the prospective future Ph.D.’s heart soar on the wings of the mighty eagle Intellect and her brain think, Isn’t this amazing! Everyone is being so solicitous and treating me like I’m so smart; academia is the best!!! Anyone who says otherwise is just jealous because they’re not smart enough! Unlike me! I AM SMART! I BELONG HERE! I WAS MADE FOR IT! All the professors I met acted as if turning into one of them—a tenured scholar at a well-ranked research university in a desirable area—were a foregone conclusion, obscuring the truth: They were really like chronic lifelong smokers who never got cancer. They were the Titanic passengers who made it onto the lifeboats. But who had time to question anyone’s motives, when I was on an all-expenses-paid trip just for me? Yes, I’d been feted and fussed over as a sidekick to the talented boyfriend in whose slender shadow I perpetually and rather happily lived—but still, now it was my turn. And it was just so warm in California. I remember drinking coffee on the UC-Irvine campus with Til, the professor who would end up being my dissertation advisor. I was dressed in a thin blazer in the middle of February, breathing in the balm in long draws, and he assured me: “This is considered cold here.”
Later, the department chair handed over a manila envelope that contained my funding package. It totaled over one hundred thousand dollars. For me! To go to school! Where there was no winter! How could I not want to do this? I mean, sure, I was suspicious of Los Angeles (having been there exactly once, for the premiere of Four Dipshits). But once I moved, it’d be pretty sweet, I imagined absurdly, with no idea what an actual Ph.D. entails (not to mention the traffic on the godforsaken 405 freeway): I’d be living (rent-free, natürlich) in Silver Lake or Los Feliz, dividing my time between red-carpet shindigs and seminars, between my boyfriend’s vapid Hollywood friends and the enchanting miseries of the (mostly) dead Germans I actually enjoyed reading now, between paging through my boyfriend’s scripts and my students’ exams. My boyfriend would earn twice as much per episode as my yearly graduate stipend, and we’d laugh about it together and watch Freaks and Geeks and drift off to sleep.
The return flight from California landed in a rare snowstorm with lightning. The roads from JFK back to the city were so bad that even if I’d had fare for a cab, I wouldn’t have been able to find one. When the subway for which I’d spent forty-five minutes waiting in my California-thin Chuck Taylors finally lurched to a stop about ten blocks away from my apartment, and I trudged home in calf-deep drifts, I thought to myself: How bad could California be? I accepted UC-Irvine’s offer almost immediately. Two months later, my boyfriend’s pilot didn’t get picked up and he informed me he’d be staying in New York. Three weeks after that, he broke up with me.
It was as if I’d been clocked in the head by an anvil, albeit one that felt really bad about being dropped from a window I didn’t realize was open above me. Why? Why? Why was this happening? There was no other woman—for that, he’d have had to leave the apartment and/or develop some social skills. I hadn’t done anything wrong. (“Is it because I got fat while you were filming Four Dipshits Go Abroad?” No, he insisted, it was not.) Nothing was really wrong. He was just … done. In effect, he did me a favor saving us the indignity of a long-distance relationship. I knew it was the right choice for everyone involved. But being single again—especially being dumped for the first time since Dylan Gellner (but who’s counting?)—felt like an anvil, and then a swift kick to the kidney, followed by the expert severing of one of my limbs. It’s not merely that I didn’t know what to do with myself, although I didn’t. It was like I’d forgotten how to walk to the corner and cross the street. Not that my boyfriend had been pushing me around in a stroller or anything—it was just that three years had turned me into someone in a long-term relationship.
Yea, verily, it had been a near-eternity: I’d entered the relationship in my mid-twenties, and I exited in my late twenties. When we got together, there was no such thing as an iPod, and by the time we broke up, everyone had an iPod, including me. And, as if on cue, my iPod gave up the ghost the very day of my dumpage, as I was attempting to get it to play a nonstop Elliott Smith megamix and it grew overwhelmed with triteness. Not to be deterred, I bought a new one (a “breakup gift” to myself despite my lack of an iPod-sufficient income)—and then I marched to the nearest bodega and procured an eleven-dollar pack of Gauloises, even though I hadn’t smoked in years. Rather than change my spanking-new Friendster profile’s relationship status to “single,” I deleted it in toto (which, as we now know, turned out not to matter much).
The bad news, then, was that I had somehow committed to move across the country to California and begin my Ph.D. alone, $14,500 yearly stipend and all. The good news, on the other hand, was that I would have a fresh start in this Ph.D. program, where at least somebody thought I was worth hanging around with. Of course, those somebodies were also under the impression that I still spoke excellent German—or, rather, that I had ever spoken excellent German, instead of the dubious five-dialect mishmash of curse words and cigarette-based vocabulary I’d finally managed to pick up back in the Loftschloss days. That was the best my spoken German had ever gotten—and it had been almost eight years since then. Graduate students and other academics often talk about something called Impostor Syndrome, which is where you are sure everyone else knows exactly what they’re doing while you’re the lone goon who is nodding along to a lecture on “performativity” without actually knowing what that means. But actually everyone is a goon and nobody really knows what performativity means. Except in this case, I actually was an impostor.
It was of tremendous importance that I fix my German before everyone found out I was full of it. With the last of the student loans I had ill-advisedly taken out to fund the thesis semester of the M.A. I was just finishing, I booked an off-season ticket to Germany and a month of eight-hour-a-day instruction at a private language school in Berlin, whose name I remembered from clever ads on the hour-long U-Bahn ride from the Loftschloss to the Freie Universität. “You wear British clothes, cook Italian food, kiss in French, and dance Latin,” they said. “But when it comes down to it, do you only understand ‘train station’?” That last bit, Verstehen Sie nur “Bahnhof,” is an idiom in Germany that basically chastises Germans for being so bad at other languages that all they can do in the countries they visit is ask where the train station is. (Appropriately enough, the only German sentence most of my non-German-speaking friends know is Wo ist der Bahnhof?) As a fan of both train stations and chastisement for jingoism, I had always enjoyed those ads, and now, eight years later, I was going to follow through. Yes, sure, I was heartbroken and terrified at a future I was facing both unqualified and alone. But at least I was, finally, going back to Berlin. It would be impossible to stay miserable when I was busy laughing my ass off over helles Hefeweizen at the Ankerklause, a pub located inside a docked boat on a canal in Kreuzberg. Take, that Heartbreak McDipshit, I thought. I was going somewhere it was physically impossible not to have an adventure. And nobody will be there to protest about how I’m not keeping him company through his alphabetical Kurosawa marathon, you weird motherfucker.
My first stop off the plane was the non-loft apartment of none other than Johannes and Paul, who were still roommates (the rest of the Loftschloss had absconded to other Teutonic parts unknown years before). They still lived on the U1 line in Kreuzberg. It had been eight years since Johannes and I broke up, precisely one month into my senior year of college, when I realized that my study-abroad self did not necessarily transcend Berlin’s borders—and yet he and Paul welcomed me, shoved a bottle of pilsner into my hand, and reinstigated staring-based nonconversation as if I’d never left. Our first stop was a Grillparty in a park hosted by Paul’s old friends Anke and Andreas, who had “received a child” just after I returned to college; the baby—whose fetal existence amid four drops of amaretto scandalized me so—was now seven, had two younger siblings, and was the ringleader of a rough-and-tumble game of pickup soccer.
