Now I’ve gone and done it. I’ve managed to work myself into a such a state of seething anxiety that I can barely keep a thought straight in my head. I’m edgy but tired, manic and depressive. My heartbeat has become irregular, I am suddenly prone to fits of irrational exuberance, and my lips are becoming chapped. And it’s all because of David Sedaris.
More precisely, I suppose, it all has to do with the way I read books. I’m not a fast reader, by any stretch—I read for pleasure and relaxation so I take my time and read aloud in my head (as it were), with appropriate dramatic pauses and rhetorical flourishes and, for some reason, a slight British accent (so what, as long as I’m having fun?). Most importantly, when it comes to my reading, I am a steadfast and disciplined serial monogamist, living exclusively with one book at time. And apparently that makes me something of a prude.
Every once in awhile, I've noticed, in the book pages of a magazine or newspaper there will be a sidebar feature called something like “What I’m Reading Now” or “What’s On Their Bedside Table,” where celebrities or notables of some sort inform a breathless public of their current reading. “Right now I’m reading the new Ian McEwan novel,” the meat puppet will be quoted as saying, “and I’m also reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and the new Garfield collection. And I’m re-reading the works of Voltaire for a project I’m working on… ” And so on. I have always taken this sort of thing as a sign of the innate tawdriness of celebrities. I mean, how self-indulgent! How promiscuous! Anyone who reads four books simultaneously is emotionally defective, if you ask me. Honestly.
But then I started keeping a book in the car. It was just a reference book on grammar issues—something I could dip into and out of with ease, something to pass the time if I found myself waiting for Kim outside a store, or in case I drove off the road and rolled over into a ditch and found myself hanging upside down by my seatbelt and I wanted to confirm that rescue is transitive when used as a verb. Soon, though, I started pulling out the “car book” every day. There are a couple of spots in my commute where I routinely come up against bottlenecks, and eventually I realized that I could use the time to get through a couple of pages. I sit there, glancing up to inch forward every once in a while, with the book propped up on the steering wheel, muttering away in a fake British accent. It’s gotten to the point where I feel perversely disappointed if traffic is flowing smoothly in these spots.
Having a second book on the go, one that I could meet up with for brief trysts at my pleasure, made me feel vaguely cosmopolitan, rather like a bon vivant Frenchman. So I have kept up the habit. Currently, I am keeping company on the side with Lynne Truss’s book on punctuation, Eats, Shoots and Leaves— an ideal traffic-jam book, if you’re the sort of person who likes to read in a British accent while motoring, as I believe I have made clear that I am.
Then, for my birthday, my mother, bless her heart, presented me with two new books from my Amazon wish list: The Perfect Mile, a stirring account of the pursuit to break the four-minute mile and the events leading up to the historic Bannister-Landy race in Vancouver, and Your Own Words by the delightfully wise and witty Barbara Wallraff, whose children I would gladly have, if I weren’t, you know, a man. That night, I finished the book I was reading (my main squeeze, not the Truss trollop I was seeing on the side) and began The Perfect Mile.
I wish I had a good excuse for what happened next. It was kind of like what Bill Clinton said recently when asked why he had carried on his affair with Monica. I guess I just did it because I could.
It was a few evenings later, and I was sitting in the living room. Kim was getting Abby ready for bed. I was tired. There was nothing on TV. And the Wallraff book was sitting there on the coffee table right in front of me.
It started innocently enough—a little fondling of the dust jacket, some light petting with the acknowledgements. Before I knew it, though, I was 20 pages into it. And I couldn’t stop. I tried to, I really did. I didn’t mean for it to go that far. I was, I don’t know—vulnerable—and her prose was so alluring and revealing, her subjects so provocative. Finally, as the hour grew late, I tore myself away and slinked off to bed. There, as I picked up my “real book,” I felt soiled and ashamed. I didn’t even bother with the British accent.
By the next day, I had persuaded myself that it wasn’t that bad, what I had done. It was even quite manageable, really. I was doing fine, after all, with The Perfect Mile as my main book and the Truss book for the car. Why couldn’t I just leave Barbara there on the coffee table, and meet for a while on the occasional evening? No big deal.
Two nights later, I was home alone with Abby, and I was reading aloud to her in a British accent from the Wallraff book, when I looked up to see that David Sedaris was on the Letterman show. David Sedaris, one of my favorite writers. David Sedaris, who has a new book out, Dress Your Family In Corduroy and Denim, which I haven’t bought yet. Oh well, I thought, as I fired up the computer and tapped my order into Amazon, I’m going to be buying it eventually anyway—may as well do it now. It’s not like I’m going to start reading it right away. But deep down, I think I knew all along what I was doing. Deep down, I think it was a cry for help.
You can see where this is going, I’m sure. The Sedaris book arrived with dispatch, and I opened the package. I eyed the cover art appreciatively. I glanced over the flap copy, and examined the author photo…and then…and then…I just started reading! What was happening to me? I used to be so disciplined about this. New books are given a quick once-over and then put aside until their time has come. Those are the rules. It’s the way I have been doing it since I was six years old. Jerry Falwell is right—you allow one moral lapse and it’s a downhill toboggan to depravity, where you’re letting goats get married and you’re reading four books at a time like some louche Hollywood phony. (Actually, I’m not sure Falwell considers multiple-book reading sinful—although I get the feeling he probably only reads one book, over and over.)
So this is where things stand now: Lynne Truss is going on about hyphens in one corner of my brain. Meanwhile, I met up with Barbara Wallraff again briefly last night as she compared the relative merits of usage manuals. David Sedaris is tugging at my sleeve and trying to tell me a story about his family. And amid all this hubbub, Roger Bannister is still trying to run that blasted four-minute mile.
There is also, of course, the small matter of having a life to live—I only get a few fleeting moments to read each day, so this kind of cognitive high-wire act is becoming increasingly exhausting. Clearly, something has to give. Maybe I’ll have to give up taking showers, or sleeping, or going to work, at least until I have things under control.
But I’m sticking with the British accent.
