n. heartbreak, from love and grief.
ex. On account of your Liebeskummer, I will forgive you that supper of Jägermeister.
For the next eight years, the closest I would get to Berlin would be my unpaid, uncredited (and correspondingly untrained and unqualified) work as a dramaturge, dialect coach, and prop master for an off-off-off-off-off-Broadway play called Berlin, which went up at the Tribeca Playhouse in the fall of 2001, in the shadow of the World Trade Center wreckage. Despite being an “equity showcase” put on by a bunch of then-amateurs, Berlin had a sold-out run. It was an awful, somber, unmoored time to be in New York, and people related to the beautifully written story, which itself took place amid rubble.
It was an improbable but redemptive romance between Heike, an aging ex-Nazi screen idol, and Bill, an American GI. And despite my substantial failure to coach the lead actress, Renata (whom you may recognize as different characters on about ninety-four episodes of Law & Order), to sound less like Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles, and despite my lackluster attention to replenishing the fake stage-whiskey, and despite the fact that it didn’t get me anywhere near actual Berlin, Berlin was also a rousing success for me personally. This was not just because I got the script changed when the playwright wanted the two leads to travel to a hotel “a couple hundred miles east” of Berlin, which is Poland. It was also due to the improbable and redemptive romance between the hot twenty-two-year-old prodigy who played the American GI and yours motherfucking truly.
In addition to being the unpaid and uncredited dramaturge, dialect coach, and prop-master, I was also the play’s sign-in manager on the day we auditioned for the male lead, Bill, a wide-eyed teenager who loves The Great Gatsby and is several measures out of his depth in the occupied, decimated German capital. We had Renata already, Madeline Kahn accent dialed all the way up, and I watched as Bill after Bill—all comely, overeager waiter-actors in their mid-to-late twenties—ambled onto the stage in the rented rehearsal space to read with her. They were all fine—you know, for actors. They read their lines with commitment; they made “choices” about the character (as they say in showbiz). But they were all still clearly acting, trapped in a mimetic performance (as they say in the academic biz).
“All right,” said Mark, the director, when yet another earnest but mediocre Bill left the stage. “That was great. We’ll call you.” He turned to me. “Anyone else?”
There was one more person on my list, but he was nowhere to be found. Maybe he’d heard Renata’s accent and skedaddled? I sprang up from my folding chair in the back and did my best self-important theatrical scamper out into the hall, where, sure enough, there was a guy with giant blue eyes, filthy blond hair, and almost impossibly delicate cheekbones, slumped down in one chair while his propped-up feet rested on another, headphones turned so high I could hear every word of what he was listening to, which was “Heart-Shaped Box” by Nirvana. From the looks of him, when that record came out he was in utero himself. He wasn’t handsome in the tanned, muscled, hairless, simultaneously-oversexed-and-sexless She’s All That teenybopper manner that was currently the rage in Hollywood—but he was arresting to look at. I touched him gently on the shoulder and he jumped. “Oh, sorry!” he said. “Am I up?”
I led him into the theater and he loped onto the stage. He sat down next to Renata and before he said a single word, everyone in the room could feel a palpable, yearning, profound sexual tension between them. In that moment I wanted nothing more than for someone to want me in the way this guy wanted that woman. What he did wasn’t acting. He just was.
Goethe’s most trusted colleague was a fellow named Friedrich Schiller, who idolized his friend so much that after Goethe’s demise, he kept the writer’s skull as a souvenir and used it as a paperweight. (Or, at any rate, what he believed was Goethe’s skull; most Germans were buried in mass graves back then, and Schiller simply chose the largest of the skulls in Goethe’s cohort, because obviously Goethe had been the smartest of whatever lot he was interred with.) Schiller was a wonderful writer in his own right, of tumultuous Sturm und Drang plays and the lofty works of “Weimar Classicism” (basically, he and Goethe imitating the ancient Greeks and Romans). But one of his most famous writings is an essay called “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry.”
Schiller’s theory was that most poets are what he called “sentimental”—he didn’t use that word in the way we use it now, but rather to denote the clear act of labor present in most writing. Sentimental poets might be technically perfect, and even great—but they were always clearly trying, often really hard. Naïve poets, on the other hand—by which he meant his buddy Goethe—didn’t have to imitate nature, because they just were nature. They were possessed by beauty, by the creative Dämon, who took hold of them and guided their hands. Their work could be messy (although Goethe’s wasn’t); it could be rough, but it was, in Schiller’s conception, genius. Genius was hard to describe—although Schiller certainly did his best, and had a helpful exemplar in his skull, I mean friend—but you knew it when you were in its presence. And that October 2001 day in fake-Berlin, in real New York, with the smoldering World Trade Center leaking noxious smoke into every corner of Manhattan, there was genius on that stage.
“Great,” said Mark when the scene was finished, and I realized I’d been gripping the sides of my chair so tightly they made my knuckles white. “We’ll call you.”
The play had its second lead—and, more important, Rebecca Schuman was interested, despite the fact that he was three and a half years her junior and seemed to have a shaky relationship with shampoo.
During production, as I futzed with the genius’s props and gave him a crash course on the grisly and desolate occupation of Germany (itself the result of my own crash course at the New York Public Library), I teased some personal details out. He was from Connecticut, had gotten his first TV role as a high-school senior, then acquired an agent and a manager and skipped college to move straight to the city and book jobs.
“So is this what you do all the time?” he asked before tech rehearsal, as I rushed in with some dubious bodega vegetables so that Mark, the goddamned visionary auteur, could have real fucking food onstage during a meal scene.
“No,” I said. “I work as a Web editor at a nonprofit, down in, you know, the financial district.” I pointed in what I thought was the general direction of my day-job’s office on Broad Street, which was a twenty-minute walk away. “But now I’m just part-time there, because…”
“Got it.”
“I started out as an editorial assistant for a book publisher.”
“Cool,” he said. “I love to read.”
“Mostly I got coffee and made Xeroxes,” I said. “But every once in a while I got to do something interesting. Like, once my boss was trying to woo P. Diddy to write an autobiography, and I got to shuttle him up a freight elevator. He was called Puff Daddy then.”
The genius didn’t look as impressed as he should have.
“It was just him and me and his son and this giant bodyguard. He drives a completely silver Mercedes.”
“Is that what you want to do with your life?” he asked. “Like, edit? Or assist editors? Ferry P. Diddy up the elevator?”
“I guess,” I said. “At one point I think I wanted to be a writer. I write things for the Internet sometimes. I realize that doesn’t really count.”
“I’m always trying to write things, but I never get past the first paragraph. I have no discipline.”
“Oh!” I said. “Once this really intense dude from the Church of Scientology was mad about how he’d been portrayed in one of my boss’s books, and he showed up at the office and, like, wouldn’t leave.”
“Now that’s fucking cool,” he said. I smiled and cleared my throat as Mark blew in and glared at me for fraternizing with the talent.
The genius did love to read. He was currently midway through No Logo by Naomi Klein, and had as a result duct-taped over what few corporate logos remained on his threadbare clothes. (He was also in the process of watching every Kurosawa film ever made, in chronological order, and planned to move on to Sergio Leone next. Autodidacticism was, by the way, such a Schillerian-genius quality.) We exchanged books—he gave me Garth Ennis’s brilliant Preacher graphic novels, and I, at this point having looped all the way around to self-parody, brought him Kafka’s Complete Stories.
“I had a pretty tough time getting through the ‘Penal Colony’ one,” he confessed. Not because it was too violent, though. Because it was “kind of boring.”
“How can you say that? That story is gripping from the first word to the last.”
The first time we ever socialized away from backstage was the wrap party, where we ignored everyone else and afterward shared a cab to our respective homes—mine a studio near Lincoln Center whose four walls I could touch at once, his a one-bedroom on the East Side, whose rent was financed by his acting jobs: a Lifetime movie; a tiny role in an upcoming film where Harrison Ford was the Russian captain of a submarine and for authenticity spoke English in a thick Russian accent; an episode, need it even be said, of Law & Order. Everyone in the cast and crew of Berlin saw us get into a cab together and assumed certain things—but, in fact, what was happening was an actual, multifaceted, honest friendship.
All right, this was primarily because the genius hadn’t been interested in me romantically. Instead, he was trying to date the girl who’d played his sister in the Lifetime movie, but she had a boyfriend, and it was all very John Hughes (whose films I much preferred to Kurosawa’s). She was sleekly coiffed and lithe as a gazelle, and had been nominated for a Golden Globe; I was a stumpy-legged fake dramaturge with a haircut I gave myself. She was in magazines and on the side of buses; I read magazines and took the bus. I was perfectly aware that Molly Ringwald ends up with Blaine, and Duckie is forever doomed to staring sexlessly in the mirror at his own awesome hat. But you know what? I’m here to tell you that sometimes Duckie does get Molly Ringwald, even if Duckie is a thick-stemmed twenty-five-year-old female dramaturge and Molly Ringwald is a much better-looking male actor on television. For as it happened, one night, as we splayed on his futon (as friends), stuffed full of gummi frogs we’d procured from the bodega next door (as friends), after spending the earlier part of the evening smoking weak New York pot (as friends) through an apple bong (which we’d carved as friends), he grabbed my head and planted one right on me. “Say something German,” he said. “Anything.”
“Uh,” I said. “Warum? Was soll ich sagen? Ich weiß nicht, was du willst.”
“God, that’s so fucking sexy,” he said.
“Uh,” I continued, paragon of articulate bilingualism that I was, “I just told you I, like, didn’t know what you wanted.”
“Who the fuck cares?” he said. “It sounds hot. Say something else.”
Two weeks later, the lease on my miniature studio was up and my career as an unpaid dramaturge meant I lacked the means to afford its rent anymore. He suggested I move in, and we lived together for half of George W. Bush’s first term and a good portion of his second.
My new actor boyfriend took great pleasure in introducing me to his friends as “a German-speaking writer.” And, in the spirit of Kafka’s Trial and the endless hermeneutics of “Before the Law,” that was both true and false at the same time. I certainly spoke German better than, say, someone who doesn’t speak it at all, and I certainly put pen to paper on a regular basis (or, at any rate, finger to keyboard, enough to develop carpal tunnel syndrome), but in the years following my B.A., I didn’t get much published (except on the Internet, which barely counted), and my German weakened and then atrophied like the leg muscles of someone who’s been in traction for a year.
Sure, when I first moved to New York after graduation in 1998, I’d attempted to keep up my fluency in creative ways. At that editorial-assistant job, for example, I took it upon myself to compose a fax in German to Leni Riefenstahl. Not at random, mind you; she’d published a photo book with my boss, a notoriously mercurial editor with an impressive Rolodex. When he wasn’t directing me to type out correspondence to Johnny Rotten, however, he was yelling at me in a way even Germans had never prepared me for. He was so legendary for intemperance, in fact, that I started journaling my various indignities (sort of like how the philosopher G. E. Moore kept a diary specifically dedicated to the different ways in which Ludwig Wittgenstein hurt his feelings). Anyway, Leni Riefenstahl never faxed back, and until Berlin, I went about systematically forgetting my German as I purged my wardrobe of its jubilant Eurotrash brights.
The closest I came to interacting with the German canon was the tattoo I’d gotten at a dingy parlor by the Lorimer Street L train station in Williamsburg, after moving there in 1999 in a desperate flight from a terrible relationship with a manipulative dick I met two weeks after graduating from college, whose eighteen months of manipulative dickishness does not merit description. To celebrate my exit, I wanted an indelible marker. In the manner of Kafka’s very not-boring “Penal Colony,” I wanted the truth of it not simply to be understood with words. I wanted to feel it, as the Officer says to the Explorer in Kafka’s story, with my wounds. This desire culminated in the procurement of a single, two-inch-high tattoo on what seemed at the time the unusual and sensual location of my middle-lower back. It was so small that the visibly annoyed artist—who scoffed No when I asked if he wanted to know the significance behind the design, which I created myself by Xeroxing a page out of The Castle at 1,000 percent—could only charge the shop minimum of fifty dollars. It took three-quarters of an episode of The Simpsons to complete, and hurt slightly more than an aggressive teeth cleaning. It consisted only of a single letter and a single piece of punctuation, made to look as if it had been stamped on with a dirty typewriter key: K. It would be the closest I’d come to thinking seriously about German literature until several years (and a much better boyfriend) later.
Never once did I think about keeping up with my German—language, literature, anything—in graduate school, because graduate school had never been part of my plan—well, real graduate school. As another measure of post-relationship-with-the-dickish-guy independence, and primarily because he had “forbidden” me to do something so stupid, I laid out many thousands of borrowed dollars to get an M.F.A. in fiction writing, occupying two evenings a week for two years feeling deeply misunderstood as a group of my peers indulgently discussed my thinly veiled autobiography. Then, after Berlin wrapped and I was shacking up with the kind, generous, and blessedly not emotionally abusive actor, I’d even parlayed that M.F.A. into a quick and depressing semester teaching Business Communications (a.k.a. remedial composition) at an unaccredited secretarial school in New Jersey. But four months spent grading on the PATH train and collapsing every night at nine thirty was enough of a detour into the hallowed halls of academe for me. My parents, two disgruntled English Ph.D.s, certainly agreed.
“Just get famous doing something and get an honorary doctorate,” scoffed Sharon Schuman when I told her I’d absconded from the secretarial school. “It worked for Dan Quayle.”
“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.
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.
Hsu was a Taiwanese guy who normally lived in Paris, a graduate student in translation, and a stellar product of the old-school Asian system of language-learning, which involves a lot of grammar work and almost no conversation. It took him about ten minutes to get out a sentence, but that sentence was always perfect. Goran was another Serb, a pompous medical student on vacation who “collected” languages as “hobbies,” as he put it, pompously. Zoë was from the French-speaking part of Switzerland, sent to improve her German by the wealthy family for whom she worked as an au pair. She spoke perfectly already, but put all her empha-SES on the wrong sylla-BLES. And then there were three other Americans: first, John, a retiree who had just moved to Berlin with his boyfriend. His German-language skills seemed based entirely on repeated viewings of Wagner’s Ring cycle, and he brought the word Nibelungen into more conversations than you’d think was relevant. Finally, there were two undergraduates on a study-abroad program. My fellow Landsleute didn’t have to identify themselves as such; I recognized the same flat vowels, forced umlauts, softened rs, and misplaced verbs that plagued my own conversations and gave me away. Wie lange bist du hier? (“How long have you been here?” or, literally, “How long are you here?”) Für zwei Monate. (“For two months,” a construction Germans do not use. They just say “two months,” or sometimes “since two months.”) As the class settled down, I plunked myself between the two Serbs.
“Du siehst genau wie eine Porzellanpuppe aus!”
(“You look just like a porcelain doll!”)
This was the teacher’s way of acknowledging me as a new student, before she handed out one of the most brutal grammar worksheets I’d ever seen. We were to decline compound-adjectival phrases cold:
“I saw a three-weeks-overdue, out-in-the-rain-left-until-it-got-soggy library book.”
“I should have gone to the cinema with my didn’t-attend-school-so-he-doesn’t-know-how-to-read cousin from Hamburg.”
After school let out for the day, the undergrads and I reverted to our native ways to learn more about each other.
“Hey!” I said. “Does either of you want to come with me on a sort of nostalgia tour through whatever’s left of dirty Kreuzberg?”
My hopes were particularly high for Declan, a lanky twenty-three-year-old senior, also from Oregon (a plus), who had the same haircut as Richard Ashcroft from the band the Verve (a double-plus).
“I’d love to!” he said. “Only thing is, I’m straight-edge and I don’t drink.”
His friend Callista could pencil in some free time in approximately two and a half weeks, but until then she was way too busy with her studies. Studies? In Berlin? Teetotaling? IN BERLIN? Motherfuck. The Serbs were no better—the one only hung out at her lesbian commune, and I couldn’t risk asking the other to do anything social, because he would immediately assume I was sexually interested in him, and I could just tell he would absolutely relish rejecting me. (I was not sexually interested in him in the least, because he was a pompous asshole.) Mu-Yuan was always busy with her vile-sounding forty-five-year-old husband, and I was too impatient to try to have a full conversation with Hsu. Johannes and Paul, meanwhile, my alleged Berlin crew, had founded some sort of legitimate computer business in their living room a few years back; they now had legitimate offices, employees, and clients and were, as Johannes put it, eh immer bei der Arbeit, which is the German expression my new host mom had translated literally to mean “always at work.”
Thus, after what turned out to be a misleadingly exciting first few days, I spent most evenings in Berlin sitting at Frau Blodau’s kitchen table while she drank and cried, nudging the conversation into German by never uttering a word of English no matter what she said or did, and drinking straight from a bottle of Jägermeister I bought at the grocery store, which I used to wash down my Abendessen of fifteen cigarettes, two bags of Erdnussflips, and a chocolate baton. My landlady loved dubbed episodes of Friends, and who was I to begrudge a grieving woman her Central Perk? I never got any potatoes with béchamel sauce, but I did learn that the German for How YOU doin’? is Na … wie GEHT’s denn so? Where was the Berlin I needed, to debauch away the loneliness that threatened to claw me to strips? What a waste of money my new artisanal travel journal was, given that all it contained was a note about a new vocabulary word I learned: Lebensgefährtin, which means “life partner.” It is, I’d scrawled wryly, no doubt distracted by German Monica and Ross in the background, near-identical to the word Lebensgefahr, which means “mortal danger.” Ha ha ha ha ha.
Luckily the unseasonably chilly May had finally given way to a weekend of hot weather, and on cue all of Berlin—which spends its pitch-dark 3:00 P.M. winter afternoons in helpful illustration of the vocabulary word trübselig, which means “cheerless,” but literally translates to “blessed with drear”—had exploded onto the sidewalks and into the parks. There was but one word that stood between me and some desperately needed mirth: Picknick. A German Picknick is different from its gingham-blanketed, letter-k-bereft, Stepford-inflected American counterpart in several ways. First, the provisions. While a well-stocked American basket might contain a stack of ham sandwiches and a thermos of lemonade, Germans (and expatriates in an Oberstufe class) will descend upon a Picknick as if it were a potluck during the apocalypse, with foodstuffs piled higher than the Berlin Wall (most of which requires a real metal knife and fork to consume, which of course they also bring)—and, of course, alcohol, which is consumed legally, openly, and with great Lebensfreude in the out-of-doors.
“You guys!” I declared to the class on a Friday morning so blindingly sunny it occurred to me that I hadn’t actually seen the sun—or felt remotely happy—since I could remember. “We need to have a Picknick tomorrow! Tiergarten park! Everyone come! Bring your friends!”
In the end, only a handful of the class showed up—Mu-Yuan had a full weekend of ironing her husband’s ties, Katja was too busy studying for her language exam, and Goran, thank goodness, had skipped class on the day we planned the outing and didn’t know about it. In the end, it was just Zoë the French Swiss, the Americans, Hsu the grammatically perfect slow talker, and me, feasting on Butterbrot and washing it down with room-temperature champagne. In honor of the warm day, I was wearing a backless cotton halter dress from Anthropologie, in a yellow-and-green floral print that was supposed to evoke 1970s glam but instead made me look like I had a starter case of hepatitis B. Few noticed the sallow tinge to my complexion, however, because everybody was looking at my boobs: the dress had a neckline that plunged halfway down my rib cage. It felt like a bit of a shame to be wasting it on Oberstufe—especially when Hsu so clearly disapproved: “If your skin is so pale and sensitive,” he said in his measured, grammar-translation-method diction, “why do you wear so little clothing?” I took a little pleasure in noting that Herr Perfektes-Deutsch used the phrase so wenig Kleider, a literalism no German would employ in that context, because it evokes a mental picture of someone draping multiple garments all over her and then removing all but a few of them. (A German would technically say so little, but Germans would never say that to begin with, because they think swimsuits are for prudes, for chrissake.) Just as I was about to tell Hsu I had on plenty of SPF 50, he got a text and jumped up.
“I’m going to get my friend from the S-Bahn station,” he said.
Huh, I thought. Hsu has a friend. Must be French or Taiwanese, because otherwise how could they ever have a conversation? To my immense surprise, fifteen minutes later he returned with an actual German dude, who introduced himself as Matthias and explained that he enjoyed meeting international students. Matthias was, we learned, in a band—with a name in nonsense-English, Assimilated Funk. He was twenty-four and in the final semester of an eighteen-month Ausbildung, or professional school, an alternative (or sometimes a supplement) to university that trains Germans for a specific vocation. This is because almost all jobs in Germany require some sort of certification. You shop for shoes in Germany, and the person who gets your size and makes officious recommendations about your foot shape is not some Al Bundy schmoe, but rather a graduate of an official certificate program in footwear retail. Matthias was training in Werbeverkauf, or ad sales. I made the silly mistake of asking what he was going to do when he was finished with his studies, and he looked at me like I didn’t know how words worked and said: “Ich werde Werbekaufmann.” (I’ll work in ad sales.)
“Sorry,” I said. “In my country, the mythos is that philosophy dropouts become multibillionaire CEOs, and people with eighth-grade educations grow real-estate empires.” (Oberstufe was working really well. Apparently all it took to get better at German was, you know, to study German a lot. Phantastisch.)
“I thought everybody in America drove a package truck,” Matthias said.
“A what?”
“A package truck. You know, like on The King of Queens.”
I told Matthias that despite my job as a professionelle Fernsehzuschauerin (professional TV watcher), I had only seen a few episodes of The King of Queens and I didn’t like it.
“Echt?” he said in disbelief. “It’s the funniest show in the world.” Germans love terrible American television for reasons I will never understand (I, in turn, love terrible German television), so this was not the deal-breaker it would have been on domestic soil. As the sun finally began to set, Matthias suggested we all meet up in a few hours out at Krumme Lanke, which sounds like “crummy lake,” but it is actually a quite lovely place to go, down in the leafy southwestern suburb of Dahlem. “I can bring my guitar and some candles, and we can sing and hang out.” This was exactly the kind of weird adventure I’d been expecting since I walked off the plane, and if I had to withstand some German-language recounting of Kevin James jokes, so be it.
Three hours later, I alighted at the Krumme Lanke station, the end of the U1 line that I used to ride to my Bertolt Brecht seminar. I expected to see the same ragtag crowd of internationals as before, but instead it was just Matthias. “Nobody else is coming,” he explained. He was, as promised, carrying his guitar and three small tea lights. I had, as promised, brought a bottle of red wine and an opener. We were, I realized with what turned out to be a very slow mind, on a date. Berlin was nearly unrecognizable to me now, full of expensive boutiques and nightclubs with international reputations that wouldn’t let someone like me in. (Not that I was a fan of German techno, which sounds like a Volkswagen and a record player challenging each other to a duel, or dancing to German techno, which primarily involves jumping up and down in one place.) I was older, too, no longer able to glom onto amorphous groups of students up to no good. But I was pleased to see that fortunes there could still turn in forty-five seconds, that a picnic with a bunch of dorks could morph into a romantic lakeside date with no warning. What’s better, I could do the whole thing in German, which would be great practice. The competitiveness of my early youth had recently resurfaced, and since I had recently discovered that German wasn’t actually that hard to learn if only one actually spent any time studying, I’d shot to the top of Oberstufe. This also had the pleasant side effect of unnerving Goran and Hsu, who were used to being the best at everything and, at least in Goran’s case, distraught to be schooled by a girl. Who knew that the key to linguistic and academic success was, you know, effort? And now here I was on some top-notch cultural immersion, if I did say so myself.
Except then, as we settled in by the lake and Matthias asked me exactly why breaking up with my boyfriend had made me so sad, before I could answer, he said, in English: “You know what? Let’s switch. I find it much easier to speak about my emotions in English.”
God dammit. Turns out he’d spent a year of high school in Ireland and spoke English as well as I did. I wanted to say that I’d rather not speak about emotions if it was going to interfere with my linguistic process. But that sentence had some tricky subjunctive constructions I wanted to get just right—plus I had to search a second for the word for “progress,” Fortschritt, literally “a step forward”—and I accidentally created about four seconds of awkward silence. Matthias took this as his cue to make a move, and asked, in English, if he could kiss me. I hesitated, but only for an instant. I knew that nothing about this evening would really take away any of my pain, my loneliness, my insecurity. But, I had also never had relations on the banks of a lake by candlelight before—and if I did, its adventure-cache would finally begin to make up for all the previous evenings spent watching German Phoebe sing “Schmuddelkatz.”
“How much longer are you going to be here?” Matthias asked later, as we rode the night bus back to Schöneberg and I inspected the abrasions on my knees caused by the rough sand.
“About two weeks,” I said.
That was his German way of informing me that we would be dating for those two weeks. He introduced me to all of his friends and took me to hang out at a sort of unstaffed informal club near the FU, where I learned to play a board game called Therapy, which plays off the general German disapproval of the mental health profession and those who partake in its practitioners.
Matthias’s friends were nice enough, with the exception of Hanno, who, when he learned that I was about to start a doctorate and enjoyed the fiction of Franz Kafka and the political theory of Walter Benjamin, just kept shaking his head and going “ACH DU SCHEISSE!” When it was my turn to read off one of the questions in Therapy, he would mimic my slight accent until whatever confidence Oberstufe had bestowed was duly obliterated. Scheiße indeed.
There were a lot of downsides to my two-week relationship with Matthias. First of all, he was the opposite of Johannes and Paul—and for that matter, any German I had ever met—when it came to his cigarettes. I was under the impression that German smokers offered cigarettes to other smokers no matter what the pretense, but after I’d bummed about three, he turned to me and said, in poorly ordered English that was out of character: “Not to be an asshole, but, maybe you buy also cigarettes?” And he, like many twenty-four-year-old Germans, still lived with his parents. This meant that if I ever wanted to have relations with him indoors, I would have to do so in his childhood twin bed. Whereas the act of bringing home a sex-companion about whom one is decidedly unserious, and parading her in front of one’s parents, is the subject of many a prudish American advice column, adult Germans who live with their parents often enjoy a relationship more akin to flatmates (except the parents still pay for all the rent and the food, and, in Matthias’s case, still cleaned and ironed his underwear).
That is why, on my penultimate morning in Berlin, as I tiptoed petrified into Matthias’s living room, he couldn’t at all see what the big deal was.
“It’s just my mum,” he scoffed in English. “She’s nice.”
I tried to take it as yet another opportunity to interact Germanically with Germans in their natural milieu. Germans are not uptight Puritans about sex. German TV plays soft-core porn after 10:00 P.M.! Germans expect their adult children to be adults. This is acceptable. Here goes. Mattias’s Mutti, on the other hand, had apparently not been told anything about me except that I was American. So when I shuffled into her dining room and mustered up my least-awkward “Morgen,” she replied at about ninety-billion decibels and a speed slower than my classmate Hsu.
“GUTEN MORGEN!!!” She pointed outside to the sky, so that I could figure out, from its morningness, what she meant.
“Hallo,” I answered, “ich bin die Rebecca.” This is the excellent way that Germans casually introduce themselves, because it contains the definite article. “I am THE Rebecca,” as if I am the only one. All foreigners immediately start doing this all the time as soon as they learn how, because everyone wants to be THE only one of themselves, and also everyone wants to signal to their interlocutor that they are no Mein Bett ist geschlossen–mumbling beginners. I might not be a native speaker—as Matthias’s dick friend Hanno never stopped pointing out—but I was fluent in German, goddammit, and I would have the friendly German Frühstück (breakfast; literally, “early piece”) that I’d squandered back at the Herrmanns’, and if I had to do it with a King of Queens fan to accomplish this, so be it, goddammit.
“OH!!!” Matthias’s mother answered, again with the face-splitting grin of the person who conflates being foreign with possessing a severe intellectual hindrance. “SPRICHST DU ETWAS DEUTSCH?!?!”
“Ach, Mama,” Matthias said sheepishly. “She studies Germanistik; of course she speaks German.”
“Ich spreche eigentlich ziemlich fließend Deutsch,” I said, but with the most confidence I could muster. (“I actually speak fairly fluent German.”)
“SURE YOU DO, DEAR!” she replied. “WE HAVE BREAKFAST IN THE OTHER ROOM FOR YOU! FRÜHSTÜCK? DO YOU KNOW WHAT ‘FRÜHSTÜCK’ MEANS?”
The good news, I realized as I sipped Matthias’s mom’s fortuitously strong coffee and affixed cheese to my Brötchen with a healthy slathering of butter, was that I had at long last managed to chip away just slightly at my Love Grief. This would have made the trip to Berlin a rousing success, if only I were about to go for a Ph.D. in being on the rebound. But alas, the linguistic confidence for which I had just paid a healthy sum still eluded me, and I returned to the U.S., left New York, moved—at the age of twenty-eight—back in with my parents for the summer, and moped about Eugene, fairly sure that I was about to begin doctoral-level study in a language in which nobody would believe I knew the word for “breakfast.”