Schadenfreude, a Love Story Page 4

  “I’m late for the newspaper,” I said, rising from his rec-room floor and making sure my jeans were zipped before I traipsed by his mother upstairs.

  After graduation, Dylan Gellner—who, since we no longer had to see each other at school every day, had been steadfastly avoiding me under the guise of looking for a summer job—ghosted on a date to go windsurfing with his buddies, which of course is what preppy ski guys do in the summer. When at last I managed to catch him on the phone, he beckoned me over to his house, where for the first time he did not lead me downstairs to his room. Instead, he sat me on the living-room couch, took a deep breath, and said: “Look, we’re leaving for college at the end of the summer anyway, and it’s useless to bide time. I like you fine, but this just isn’t working for me anymore.”

  I don’t know what I’d been expecting. We hadn’t had a decent conversation in weeks (well, two weeks; our whole relationship had lasted three months to the day). We’d never discussed a long-distance relationship in college, and I was, to be honest, intrigued by the potential angst-ridden Kafka fans that awaited at Vassar, a.k.a. College #6, the single institution of higher learning that had deigned to accept me into its class of 1998. But I’d pictured a summer of Sisyphus and sex-filled camping trips before a tearful, lovelorn, and mutual farewell sometime in mid-August. Dylan Gellner was still the only person who had ever really understood how I felt about reading and writing, about being different (considerably deeper and more profound, obviously) than my peers—who had actually felt the same way. I was under the impression that even if we stopped seeing each other, we’d always feel that way together, and never really stop loving each other. Instead, Dylan Gellner solemnly informed me that he’d be needing the rest of the summer to himself to practice differential geometry, and so I shouldn’t call him or talk to him (he would allow one farewell meeting in the park, but he’d call me). On the way home, I briefly considered swerving off his winding street into one of the adjacent ravines.

  Getting dumped by Dylan Gellner was the literal worst thing that had literally ever happened to me and so there was no hiding it from David and Sharon Schuman. As I sat in the TV room, unable to tear myself away from Animaniacs—I knew Dylan Gellner would be watching it, too, and he wouldn’t be able to stop us from having one last shared experience—with tears splattering onto the lap of my stonewashed jean shorts, I saw my dad’s lithe Semitic form fill the doorway and then shuffle to the couch, where he sat down beside me.

  “Hey, Bek,” he said. “I heard you and, um, Dylan? I heard you broke up.”

  I sniffled.

  “I remember when my girlfriend in college broke up with me.”

  Sniffle.

  “I got really drunk. God, I was such an asshole.” He patted me three quick times on the thigh and disappeared back into his study.

  I moped through days of work at my summer job stuffing envelopes for one of my mom’s friend’s charities, and I moped through composing my final local-newspaper columns before leaving for college (each of which had taken an un-Barryesque melancholy turn and contained at least three veiled references to the demise of my relationship). I moped through every afternoon, sprawled on my back in the middle of my parents’ long carpeted hallway, staring balefully at the ceiling.

  One day in mid-July, my mom leaned over me and asked: “If you could be anywhere, anywhere at all, where would you be?”

  “Dead.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Okay, then, camping by myself.”

  She bought me a brand-new tent and let me use the car for the weekend. I forgot my Therm-a-Rest pad; my stove leaked and I set a picnic table on fire; I tried to take a hike, but ended up walking down a highway alone under the blazing hot sun, and I got chauffeured back to my campsite by a mom in a minivan who assured me that God had a plan for me. (Her giving a ride to a teenage drifter that day probably counted as her Christian charity for all of 1994.)

  The only person I wanted to hang out with in the festering cesspool of my heartbreak was Franz Kafka. And, unsurprisingly, he was an even worse influence than my dad. Case in point #1: I stopped eating, inspired by the title character in the short story “A Hunger Artist,” about a circus performer who sits in a cage and starves himself for sport in front of an audience. I was actually thin for the first time in my life—but, as with the Hunger Artist, it took no effort, so I didn’t care. If only the spectators knew that fasting was the easiest thing in the world, thinks the Hunger Artist, before departing a world that doesn’t appreciate him, only to be replaced after his death by a slavering young panther. The Hunger Artist’s problem, I realized, was not that—in his own unreliable words—he’d never found the food he liked. It was probably just that he’d been dumped.

  Case in point #2: Aside from The Metamorphosis, Kafka is primarily known for the strange request he made of his friend Max Brod upon his demise, of tuberculosis, at age forty, that all of his unpublished writing be destroyed. (Brod famously disobeyed.) Not to be outdone, seventy years later almost to the day, I wrote a journal entry that contained only the sentence “Pain is the lasting part of love”—and then I put that journal in the family charcoal barbecue and set it on fire.

  As if the shame of it would outlive me.

  2.

  Sprachgefühl

  n. knack for language, from speech and feeling.

  ex. When learning German to fluency, Sprachgefühl is a viable substitution for effort.

  To be honest, Dylan Gellner shoulders only part of the blame for my poor life choices. (I, of course, continue to be blameless.) The rest goes to my freshman German literature professor at Vassar, James Martin. (Not to me.) I loathed Professor Martin on the first day of class, because his introductory lecture was about the expressive power of human language—and he was teaching a course on modern German literature in translation, which meant Kafka, which meant he didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about, since everyone knew Kafka’s main problem was that he couldn’t talk about what he needed to talk about.

  It turns out, unsurprisingly, that I was the one who didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about, and Professor Martin’s view on the Austrian language crisis was quite a bit more nuanced than mine—truly shocking, given that he had tenure and a Ph.D. from Princeton, and I had a 5 on the AP Literature exam and three months’ worth of twin-bed intercourse with Eugene, Oregon’s foremost underage literary critic. Professor Martin was, it turns out, the best literature professor I have ever had, before or since. It is, in fact, a continuing testament to his exegetic might that he enamored me of Thomas Mann, even though Mann is a Jet to Kafka’s Shark, a Rolling Stone to his Beatle, a stick of deodorant to his patchouli. German literary scholars like either Thomas Mann or Franz Kafka, is what I’m saying, but thanks to Professor Martin’s magisterial ability to pinpoint exactly the most transcendent part of every piece of literature written in the German language between the years of 1890 and 1960, I walked out of his course liking both.

  My favorite Mann story was Death in Venice, a novella about a curious fellow named Gustav von Aschenbach, a writer who goes on vacation to Venice during a cholera epidemic. While everyone around Aschenbach is keeling over, he spends his time pitying an old guy who’s done himself up with makeup and hair dye, ostensibly to make himself look younger, but with a markedly grotesque effect instead—and then Aschenbach falls in love with a gorgeous young Polish boy named Tadzio (or Tadeusz in Polish), which is a play on Tod, the German word for “death.”

  “Every German understands that Tadzio is Death immediately,” explained Professor Martin in class, as he ran his hand over his stern-looking blond flattop. “Yet another reason to try to read all of this in the German.”

  Aschenbach never so much as talks to the boy, but love consumes him—here’s a huge surprise: Thomas Mann was a closeted gay guy—and, fully obsessed with Tadzio’s youth and beauty, he goes to the barbershop and gets himself done up like that pathetic old dude he mocked before. Wouldn’t you
know it, now Aschenbach is himself a pathetic old dude—and to seal his fate, so that his metaphorical reality matches his literal one, he succumbs to the sensual deliciousness of a carton of overripe strawberries, which obviously give him cholera.

  When I wrote my first essay for Martin’s class I got an A, which back in the dark ages of the mid-1990s was not the baseline grade of acceptability, and actually meant exceptional. (I should know, because I didn’t get many after that.) On the back, Martin wrote that I’d made an “extremely fine” effort, “nuanced and rich,” despite my clear misuse of the word abhor on multiple occasions. On the basis of this alone, I decided to be a German major midway through my first semester—despite knowing exactly that half-semester’s worth of German, courtesy of Frau von der Haide, a wonderful émigré from Leipzig with a Dorothy Hamill bob, who assured us with a flip of her hand on the first day of class that no matter what anyone said, German was leicht (“easy”).

  This was an absolutely terrible idea that somebody should have talked me out of. My parents just shrugged (“It’s not like there’s an accounting major at Vassar anyway”), but the rest of my dad’s side of the family—the Jewish side—was duly perplexed.

  “A German major, huh?” asked my grandfather, during a winter-break visit to my extended family in Chicago, when I had a hard time concentrating due to the raging discomfort of my very first urinary tract infection, thanks to a stupid vanilla-flavored condom I’d gotten free from the health center and used, before it made us both burn and scream, with the curly-haired boy down the hall. “What made you want to choose that?”

  My father’s father had spent the better part of 1945 liberating concentration camps. “Well, it’s just for the literature, Grandpa,” I said. “And, did you know that pretty much every great German writer was a Jew? It’s true. Plus, Kafka was technically Czech. Or Austrian. Or Czechoslovak. Something not German.”

  “Well, I hope you enjoy it,” he said. “I didn’t really enjoy college. Mostly just something to get me into law school.”

  “What about playing football with President Ford?”

  “That was all right, except I broke my nose twenty-seven times.”

  Back on campus, Professor Martin had been slightly more enthusiastic to learn about my poorly thought-out scholarly choices. “Hot damn!” he’d cried, and handed me one of his own pens to fill out the paperwork. “Wait,” he said. “How much German have you taken?”

  “Just 101,” I said. “But ask Frau von der Haide—I’m the best one in there.”

  Martin sent me home with a brochure for the college’s summer program in a German city called Münster, a placid and picturesque university town near the Dutch border, where there were almost as many bicycles as inhabitants. To spend the summer in Germany! To leave the U.S. for the first time, and without the Schumans to cramp my style! Since Oregon was about six thousand miles round-trip out of the way, I’d leave straight from school in late May—to go where the drinking age was eighteen, the very age I happened to be! And most important of all, I’d get some of that “language immersion” I’d been hearing about since I was a kid. “You pretty much can’t learn a second language after about the age of seven,” said Sharon Schuman, whose Ph.D. is not in linguistics. “But immersion is the next best thing.” I was pretty sure immersion was code for magic and involved amassing total fluency in a matter of weeks with zero effort.

  That is why, instead of reading simple German stories, or listening to German tapes, or studying irregular verb conjugations, I spent the days before my departure from Poughkeepsie packing up my dorm room and constructing a homemade travel journal from scratch—like a veritable angst-ridden MacGyver—out of a cardboard box, an old pillowcase, rubber cement, thirty sheets of leftover printer paper, and the sewing kit my mom had insisted I bring along to college in case any of my trousers of choice (men’s wide-wale cords four sizes too big) sprung a leak. I decorated the cover with a curlicued EUROPE ’95 and an artistically rendered ankh, before tucking it safely into my navy-blue JanSport backpack, right on top of my stupid pouch of Drum tobacco (I’d recently started smoking roll-your-own cigarettes, just like that excellent role model, John Travolta in Pulp Fiction), and my hulking “compact” German-English dictionary, which I’d won as a prize for being the year’s top-achieving freshman.

  After stuffing the contents of my incense-reeking dorm room into a storage trunk for the summer, I parted my fluorescent-yellow hair—recently shorn into a scraggly pixie and bleached in the dorm bathroom—and fastened it down with two little-girl’s plastic barrettes. I lugged my bulging suitcases onto a Metro-North train to Grand Central, then a bus to JFK, where I disembarked breathlessly at the international terminal for the first time in my life. At the gate, I made out the silver-gray Peter Tork coif of Herr Neudorf, the jovial seventy-two-year-old from Bamberg who had been heading up the Münster program since shortly after the erection of the Berlin Wall.

  “Oh, Webecca!” he said in his accent as thick as the Black Forest. “I can tell you’ve been up to NO good! NO good! I call your muzzah, and I tell her EVEWY-SINK! Come, come. Evewy-one else is alweady awwived!”

  It turned out Herr Neudorf’s charms were universal, for he’d secured for our group an out-of-use first-class lounge while we waited. He led me in and motioned for me to take my place in the circle of young people already seated on the floor. (You can always locate the group of American college students at any international gate in the world, for they will be the ones sitting in a circle on the floor.)

  I recognized Anneke, the Dutch girl with the milky-white skin and ethereal smile who sat next to me in Frau von der Haide’s class. I waved, and she scooted over to make room for me. “We’re going to be roommates at the youth hostel in Cologne!” she said.

  “Is it going to be weird for you to change planes in Amsterdam and not stop?” I asked.

  “A little,” she said, “but it’s a great airport. You’ll like Schiphol.” She pronounced it SCKGGGGCKHIP-pl, which I surmised was the correct way to do so.

  “German is going to be so easy for you,” I said. “I mean, isn’t it pretty much just Dutch but meaner?”

  “That’s a sweeping generalization, isn’t it?” said the guy sitting on the other side of me, a petite but elegant-looking hippie leaning against an army duffel and a clarinet case. He’d been in Frau von der Haide’s class, too, but he’d sat on the other side of the room.

  “Oh, hey, Fernando,” I said.

  “You can call me Freddie,” he said. “Frau von der Haide called me ‘Fernando’ on the first day of class, and it sounded so nice in her accent I never wanted to correct her.” It was true; even the way she said Schlumpf (Smurf) sounded charming. (Die Schlümpfe, huge in Germany, was originally a Belgian cartoon, which in retrospect makes a tremendous amount of sense.)

  Just then, another latecomer ambled in—a handsome Korean kid wearing a baseball cap that looked like it hadn’t been washed since the 1986 Mets won the World Series. Freddie turned to greet him. “What’s up, Justin?” he asked. “You ready for a valuable immersion experience in German language, history, literature, and culture?”

  “I’m ready for a nap on the plane.”

  That wasn’t a bad idea, of course—but who could indulge in such trivialities as sleep on her very first ride on a 747, where the towering blond flight attendants changed outfits in the middle of the night, and they served dinner and then breakfast, both of which were somewhat edible? If I napped, I might miss the free white wine, or a hot towel, or the end of Disclosure, the movie where Demi Moore sexually harasses Michael Douglas, which KLM Royal Dutch Airlines played in its uncensored entirety. By the time we disembarked on the other side of the Atlantic, I felt like my teeth were growing hair, and due to sheer exhaustion I almost keeled over and fell out of my seat into the aisle of the much smaller plane that flew us from Amsterdam to Düsseldorf, but I could sleep for all of 1996. Now was the time to see if I could do some of that magic “immersion” and
get myself fluent before the bus docked in Cologne, our first stop in the whirlwind two-week bus tour that was to serve as a general introduction to all things Teutonic.

  I mean, I’d definitely been practicing my German. Or at any rate, I’d continued to be the best student in my German 101 class. Every test, quiz, and one-page “mini-essay” (about such prescient, intellectual topics as whether I owned a cassette player—I did!) had come back scrawled with As. There had never been a class-time exercise that I had not been able to master. So although I had never so much as read a single sentence of Goethe, Mann, or even the great unassailable Kafka in the original—nor had I ever had a single conversation with a German, other than the beloved and overly enunciative Frau von der Haide—as far as I was concerned, I was pretty much a native speaker, especially given that anything I didn’t already know I would acquire through magic.

  This is not what happened. What happened is that I spent the next two weeks speaking very loud English on the bus and making a general Arsch out of myself on the few occasions I had to speak to an actual German. This wasn’t magic at all. It was, like, hard! The thing is, Frau von der Haide was still right. German’s not a categorically difficult language. (Really, check the five-point scale of difficult languages for native speakers of English. Spanish and French are ones; German ranks a two; the fives include Mandarin, Arabic, and Korean.) And yet, German’s ease comparative to Farsi and Uzbek (both fours) notwithstanding, the dulcet vernacular of Nietzsche and Wagner has the undeniable characteristic of sounding mean and nasty to the untrained ear, and of requiring a near-total grasp of some voluminous grammar conventions to communicate even simple concepts. This can make it seem hard when everyone around you is talking at Autobahn speed, and you have no idea what they’re saying, but it sounds like they might be ordering you to murder a kitten, immediately.