Schadenfreude, a Love Story Read online

  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.

  But Paul and Johannes didn’t really begin their evening until midnight, when I once again hopped onto the handlebars of Johannes’s bike and allowed myself to be spirited through backstreets of neighborhoods I didn’t recognize (our old haunts in Kreuzberg and Mitte, they explained, were now full of yuppies). We first downed several giant bottles of Beck’s, “served” at a chichi members-only establishment whose gimmick was that it had vending machines instead of staff. I’ll just drink away my jet lag, I thought helpfully to myself, as we then moved on to a tiny, encouragingly dingier club, where Paul shoved yet more Beck’s into my mitts and we listened to a band called Die Schlümpfe (The Smurfs, because of course) sing a blistering cover of the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?”

  And it was at that precise moment, hearing that song—which my erstwhile boyfriend had once played some seventy thousand times during a month-long cross-country road trip (“Let’s just bring ten CDs and get to know them really well!”)—that my evening swerved from euphoric-drunk, to drunk-drunk, and directly on to very-sad-drunk. I spent the rest of the wee hours chain-smoking Paul’s cigarettes and crying to Marlene, Johannes’s empathetic and messy-haired girlfriend. Silver lining: after eight years barely speaking a Wort of Deutsch, I managed an entire conversation, about difficult and wrenching emotions—and I learned an important new vocabulary addition: Liebeskummer. Loosely translated it means “heartbreak,” but literally it means “love grief.” “How long will it be until I feel better?” I asked her. “A month? Two? Five? Never?”

  She just shook her head before looking at the time and declaring that since it was almost four in the morning, they’d better start their night in earnest. The legendary techno club Tresor was about to close its doors for good, and they wanted to make sure they arrived during peak hours. I demurred and took Paul’s keys so that I could stare mournfully into space on the night bus and then crash on their couch to grieve my love in peace. “I don’t understand why you’re paying all that money to stay with a host family!” Johannes said before I left the next morning. “You could have just stayed with us.”

  “For a month?” I asked. “I don’t want to impose.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “I’m insulted that you didn’t want to.”

  That’s the thing about Germans. You don’t talk to them for eight years, and then you go out to drinks, and they spend the whole time ignoring you while they argue with someone else about football—but then they nonchalantly invite you to freeload for weeks on end.

  The next afternoon, I dragged my backpack down to the district of Schöneberg, where my new host family lived: Frau Blodau and her two grown daughters. Rather than not-impose on my old friends, I wanted a do-over of the Herrmann family shit-show I’d created in 1995. I was a grown-up now. I knew enough German to know what the fuck was going on in the house. I was ready to keep track of my keys, to stay off the landline, to take my shoes off at the door and then put on a different pair of identical shoes that weren’t allowed out of the house. My showers would be so short they wouldn’t even exist. I would be home for lunch, Mittagessen (and, why the fuck not, Abendessen later on, too), ready to immerse and converse. Bring’s jetzt!

  I was buzzed up into a spacious, high-ceilinged flat, with innumerable mysterious locked rooms off the Flur, or foyer, that is the centerpiece of every German apartment. “Welcome, hello!” gushed Frau Blodau, my new landlady … in English. I greeted her back in the most accent-perfect German I could, following my own rules for establishing the relationship in the learned language and hoping she’d get the hint. She led me into the kitchen and invited me to sit down with her. “I just drink a little wine,” she explained—in English. It was 9:00 A.M. It turned out that she was partaking of the hair of the dog, thanks to her monumental Kater, which literally means tomcat but actually means hangover.

  “Oh,” I said, “were you celebrating?”

  “In a way,” she said. “It was my best friend’s funeral. She committed suicide this week.”

  Oh boy.

  “Did you sign up for full board?” she asked.

  “Ja,” I answered. “Und ich freue mich sehr darauf.”

  “You look forward to it, yes, good,” she continued in German-syntax English. “But normally we’re not eating together. Petra is many nights at her boyfriend, and Elise is forever at the work.” She pointed me to some sad packaged bread and a few abused-looking jars of preserves, and the coffee machine (Gott sei Dank!), and then showed me to my bedroom, which was furnished top to bottom in what I recognized as the very cheapest versions of everything IKEA makes.

  “The bed is in order, yes?” she asked, as I plopped down onto
what had to be a two-inch futon.

  “Ja, klar!” I said. I was going to be Frau Blodau’s Kelly, by Gott, and no dead friends, English, sad breakfasts, dearth of all other meals, or dubious sleeping arrangements would stop me.

  After waking up at four the next morning and passing the time until my pitiful solo breakfast doing sun salutations in my room (a NEW ME! habit which lasted precisely the duration of my jet lag), I hopped on the U-Bahn and rode to the genteel district of Wilmersdorf to begin my reeducation. I’d be attending group class in the morning and then have two hours with a private tutor in the afternoon. “Ach, Wilmersdorf,” Marlene had scoffed about the language school’s location. “You’ll learn lots of important bourgeois words like Sahnetorte.”

  “I already know that word,” I’d said. (I’d never actually heard it before, given that cream cakes hadn’t been a regular offering at the Loftschloss, but I figured it out through context.)

  Wilmersdorf did appear stately when I arrived after a train ride that was, to the second—as the school promised in my registration materials—exactly seven minutes long. There weren’t going to be any beers served through holes in a wall (or Automaten-Bars, for that matter), here among the nineteenth-century apartment buildings and mellow corner bakeries. I took my place in line to register for my first day of classes and tried not to be proud when I was placed in Oberstufe, the most advanced level of German they taught, given that I myself would be entrusted to teach beginning German some thirteen months in the future.

  At the school, located in one of the nineteenth-century apartment buildings, which had been renovated into a hodgepodge of classrooms and a small café, I tiptoed through a dizzying maze of courtyards and hallways until I found the Oberstufe classroom, where about ten adults were conversing in rapid-fire German, each with an accent and set of understandable grammatical errors that gave away not only his or her background, but also, in short order, his or her reason for plopping down 150 euros a week for German class. Katja, from Serbia, was about to enter graduate school at the FU and needed to pass the good old TestDaF in order to secure funding. Being a Slav, she would always use the genitive case when discussing plurals of objects larger than four in number, but never use it when constructing a possessive. Mu-Yuan was a nineteen-year-old from a tiny, provincial village in mainland China, who matter-of-factly informed the class that she had been permanently disowned by her family for marrying a forty-five-year-old German. She was upping her already-excellent fluency so that she could work as an office manager and spend less time cleaning up after the forty-five-year-old’s kids, some of whom were older than she was.