Babes, Beaches & Books

October 7, 2007
Article and Illustration By Jim Burger

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Mrs. Burger is in one of those women-only book clubs that are all the rage these days. The idea sounds wonderful — sharp women sitting together, intelligently discussing great literature. The reality, though, is every few weeks a truckload of hens shows up at my house and they immediately start screeching at each other. Behind their backs I call them the Blah-Blah Sisterhood. Their arrival is always preceded by days of menu planning, cooking and tidying — chores otherwise unknown in the Burger household. To her credit, my wife is a voracious reader, devouring books, sometimes several at a time. What few idle minutes she has in her hectic life are spent with books. It is her one true source of relaxation. Never have I recognized even a single title or author she is reading. Her, and the club’s, appetite for pulp is seemingly unquenchable.

The rituals of the coven are a mystery to me, but that is of my choosing. On meeting nights I try to leave home before the yentas arrive and return after I’m sure they’re gone. I’ve always had my suspicions it is a book club in name only. One time I came back to find my wife cleaning up after a meeting. The house looked as if it had been ransacked. The dining room table was covered with dishes. Empty wine and champagne bottles littered the parlor.

“How did the girls like the book?” I asked.

“We thought it was stupid, so no one read it.”

“Well, if no one read it, how do you know it was stupid?”

She looked at me as if I was the most dimwitted person on the planet and dismissed me with a wave of her hand.

Last month I misjudged the adjournment time and came back too soon. Once again it appeared as if the World Wide Wrestling Federation had dropped by for supper. But the house was empty — the club members had moved onto the patio so they could bother my neighbors. I stood by an open window hoping to hear part of the ladies’ book review. Within two minutes their conversation jumped from movies to hair appointments to housing costs to fitness to baby size. It ended with a story about someone’s husband complaining that their refrigerator was so full of breast milk there was no room for food. With that I took my car keys and headed back to the bar I had just left.

My approach to books is more practical. I read for knowledge or as the means to an end. The latter approach was discovered during that all-important, horizon-broadening trip to Ocean City after high school. My friends and I moved along the boardwalk in a pack trying to pick up girls and failing with alarming regularity. In an uncharacteristic moment of clarity, I peeled off from the group and entered a bookstore to do some research. I leafed through that summer’s best-seller — Scruples by Judith Krantz. I filled my head with names and as much of the plot as I could stomach and set off down the beach. In no time I found one of the Free State’s comely lasses stretched out on a blanket by herself reading the book. I said hello. No response. I made an oblique, yet fawning, reference to the story’s protagonist, a strong, ambitious woman. With that, I was invited to sit down. I do not romanticize. It was a delicious afternoon. We whiled away hours chatting about a book that to this day I have not read. Later we went to a poolside bar for a drink and eventually ended up in her hotel room where we, well, you know.

But it was in college where I really hit my stride. The language and literature department of the Maryland Institute was outstanding, the textbook selection masterful. The professors unknowingly armed me for a lifetime of fascinating cocktail party conversation. I honed my skills in Baltimore’s ubiquitous fraternity-dominated bars. Bored girlfriends of lacrosse junkies practically flocked around me to deconstruct James Joyce while their oblivious dates watched some meaningless game on television. Gracefully I steered the conversation back, again and again, to one of the two Joyce stories in my anthology. My attentions did occasionally cause a row. If the boyfriend stormed out, I gallantly stood by offering my shoulder to cry on and words of comfort — from Joyce, naturally.

Still later I discovered the poets of the Age of Enlightenment. College girls seemed especially receptive to tragic figures, so I counted myself an honorary Cavalier, along with Sir John Suckling, Richard Lovelace and Robert Herrick. I committed some works by the latter to memory as they practically guaranteed a home run in the ballgame d’amour. I still remember reciting his “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” to one wide-eyed girl. She was putty in my hands. And I write these words exactly nine years from the day I married her.

Filed Under: View From Mars

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