Chapter 9, Bad Novel

The one thing you should never do is lead my mother to the bar.

But that’s what the doorman did; then, he put the quiet word into the bartender’s ear. And so we had our “drink” on the house; diet Coke for me, a brandy Alexander for my mother. And perhaps it was true that the first drink was on the house; the remaining five or six were not. But there were credit cards, so who cared?

In short, my mother was getting sloshed, and she did what drunks do. Her speech slurred, her thoughts muddled, and she began to get a bit weepy with the bartender.

“Who knows what I might have become, if I had stayed in the city,” she told the bartender.

“Mom—do you have to? This guy probably doesn’t care…”

“Well, of course he cares! Bartenders love talking to people—that’s why they do what they do.”

Right—I thought. This guy woke up one day and wanted to spend a lifetime seeing middle-aged women from the Midwest get sloshed in a high-class bar. So he hoofed it down to the Ritz, and here he is, twenty happy years later!

“Oh, I was young and fancy-free, and living in the Village. That was back when you could—rent was low, all the boys were off fighting in the war, and all of us girls were having the times of our lives. Everywhere you went, there were signs telling us to support the war effort, buy bonds, plant victory gardens. But mostly what I remember was how free we all were! I remember coming home and walking through the Village at three in the morning, and never thinking the least of it. Oh, there was the occasional burglary, or pickpocket, but never anything serious. And then, well…then I met my future husband, and everything changed. Are you married, dear?”

The bartender had been looking for an escape, but it was still early in the afternoon; the lunch crowd was gone, the serious drinkers had not arrived. So he was stuck with us.

“No, Ma’am.”

“Well, don’t be in too much of a hurry. Though men have a better time of it than women; men have their careers, they have their lives. But we women, well—we just tag along, somehow, and then we wake up one day and we’re forty or fifty, and things are sagging, but the men are still good looking. Better than ever, in fact, since that grey-haired temple is even sexier than it was before. So there we are, and our husbands have their careers, but we’ve never had much of anything—we’ve been teachers or nurses, if anything. So then the husbands are flying out to give their keynote speeches in conventions in Dallas or Denver, and of course you don’t go, because you can’t get off work, or because who will look after the kids? And that’s when…”

‘I will kill her,’ I thought, ‘if she actually goes there. Because you’ve been throwing this into father’s face for the last three years, now. Yes, I’ve heard you. I hear the fights, the recriminations, the glasses thrown, the doors slam. Listen, Mom, the best thing that ever happened to you was that stupid affair. Now you get to be the perfect bitch all the time—lording it over Dad, blackmailing him, making him feel guilty. Oh, and you probably haven’t given it to him forever, since he came back!’

She was fumbling for a tissue—the bartender handed her one.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “you just seem like a very nice fellow. Kind, understanding….”

‘BORED’

“I hope you find someone nice to love you, dear,” she said. “And when you do, well, promise me, promise me…”

‘NO!’

“Well, you won’t let anyone or anything come between….”

“No, Ma’am,” said the bartender, who did not want to get where this was going.

“There’s no pain like it,” said my mother. “The hurt! The betrayal! You can never fully trust again! Every day when he comes home, you look at his shirt collar. He has an emergency at the hospital, and do you believe that? Or do you think about getting in the car, and driving past all the likely places where a man takes a woman? The bars, first. The restaurants where you can’t even see the menus. Then there’s the motels. Well, by that time, he really will be home—and what will you say if you come home and he’s there? So you go and buy a bag of groceries that you don’t need, and then, then….”

She was slurring her speech badly, now, and beginning to wobble in her chair—‘God,’ I thought, ‘don’t, please don’t let her fall off that bar stool!’

“So there you are, coming in the door, and what do you have in that grocery bag of yours? Because there he is, hungry and irritable, and well on his way into the third or fourth drink…”

‘Thank you SO much, mother!’

“…and all you have to give him is cookies and chocolate chip ice cream, ‘cause you’re so miserable that all you want is something sweet, and then he looks at all that shit—excuse my French—you bought, and he looks down at your waist. And he just keeps staring, and he can still wear his army uniform, but now you’re just an old, fat, ugly, good-for-nothing woman and then you remember that he had an affair, oh, he had an affair! Oh, how could he! Three years it’s been, and the pain is like it was yesterday! Whatever happened to us! Tell me, dear man, where did my husband go? Where did I go? Because I’m spinning, spinning…I don’t know where I’ll fall…the pain of it all…”

“Ma’am?”

“Oh, I’m sorry for being a silly old cow…”

“No, Ma’am,” he said, and looked at me. I nodded.

“It’s just that I think you should let your daughter…”

I already had her arm—I was hoping that she’d go without a fight. Fortunately, she was just sober enough to realize what an ass she was being.

“Perhaps I should rest before dinner,” she said. “You’ll put the tab on the room bill, won’t you, honey?”

The bartender probably would have paid the damn drinks, just to get her out of the bar.

So it was a weepy ride up to the 12^th floor, and a struggle to get her down to the room, and then it was the hell of getting the key out of the bottom of her purse and opening the door. So I propped her up against the wall, leaned into her to keep her from falling, and opened the door. We both nearly fell into the room.

“Now, where is….”

“Here, Mom,” and I led her into the bedroom. She was asleep almost before she hit the bed. Still, I figured I’d wait until the first snore….

Five minutes later, I was sailing out the door of the Ritz-Carlton, about to taste the city for the first time! 

   
 

Chapter 8, Bad Novel

Breakfasts were hell: I would sit in front of the scrambled eggs every day, and if the smell of them had made me gag when not pregnant, they really affected me now. Yet the “Blessed Mother” was insistent: I would eat them, or I would be on bathroom duty before school.

I’ve never scrubbed so many toilets in my life….

The days wore on: the monotony of the orphanage was part of the regime.

“I hate this place,” I whispered to the girl sitting next to me in class.

“Me, too,” she said, “but it’s better than home…”

“What?” I asked. “How’s that?”

“Well, at least you get enough to eat. We were just scraping by back home. I got really tired of macaroni and cheese….”

We never got macaroni and cheese—my father believed in meat at every dinner. Anything less was, well, low class.

It was just a part of our lives: the latest cars, the biggest televisions, and the credit cards that seemingly paid themselves. When we went to Connecticut, I saw the reason why. The limousine would be waiting for us at the airport, and James, who seemed to have known father forever, would be struggling to put our luggage in the trunk. We’d try to help, but he insisted; when it became clear that it was a matter of pride for him, we finally gave up.

If there are any bad parts of Greenwich, Connecticut, well, I never saw them. We would fly in to New York, usually, and then be shuttled up to my grandmother’s house. But I was curious—what was New York City like? And why did we never stay there; why did we flee the city the moment we landed at the airport.

“Who the hell would want to go there? The place is a dump.  Filled with trash, niggers, burnt out buildings, crime. The place is just a wreck,” so said my father. My mother nodded.

“Broadway, Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum,” I said.

“Don’t you have a record player in your room?” said my father.

“It’s not the same,” I said. “And even if the city is a wreck, I still want to see it.”

“Well, she has a point, Jim,” said my mother. “Those are things that she should experience. I’d love to see a Broadway show myself….”

“Whatever,” my father said. “If you want to go, go. Just don’t expect me to go with you.”

And so it was settled—we would leave a week after school finished, spend five days in the city, and then go up to Connecticut with my father. My mother, completely characteristically, called the Ritz.

“It’s just off Central Park,” said my mother, “so we can take a carriage ride through the park.”

A carriage ride? I wanted to see the city, I wanted to walk the streets; my mother wanted me safely inside a carriage, being pulled through a dump.

That’s what it was then—there was trash all over the place, the benches had been vandalized, or had drunks sleeping on them. The grass had been trampled to death, and the building were there seemingly for graffiti, nothing else. It was like taking a ride through a war-zone.

“Bitch, take you fuckin’ cunt daughter outta the park,” called one black man.

My mother raised her gloved hand to her mouth.

“Driver,” she said loudly, “did you hear that man! The rudeness! I never! He must be reported at once!”

“Dint hear nothin’, lady,” the driver said.

“But that’s impossible,” said my mother. “He shouted at us! He insulted us! Where are the police?”

Wherever the police were, they weren’t in the park. Abruptly, my mother ordered the carriage driver to return to the Ritz. Then, she demanded a partial refund; we had paid for an hour, but only used 15 minutes or so.

“Can’t refund no money, Lady. You pay me for your time, I give you my time.”

They went around and around about it. As my mother insisted harder, the scene grew nastier. We were just across the street from the Ritz, but still in the park. That’s when I realized: we were the only white people in the park. And the passerby made it pretty clear whose side they were on.

“Ugly white bitch,” one person hissed.

“Outta take all her money,” another added. “She got plenty mo…”

“Come on, Mom, let’s get out of here,” I told her.

“I most certainly will not,” said my mother, “not until this man refunds our money.”

A small crowd grew around us, and the comments were not favorable.

“Bitch thinks she own everything….”

“Outta stay out in the suburbs and leave us alone….”

At last, the doorman from the Ritz left his post, approached my mother, addressed her as “Ma’am” and asked if she wasn’t a guest at the hotel.

“Why, I most certainly am,” said my mother, “we have a suite on the 12th floor, overlooking the park.”

“Oh, she got a suite in the Ritz! Bitch truly got money!”

“Madam, allow me to escort you back to the hotel. And of course, if you’d like to enjoy a drink at the bar, or a cup of tea, on the house, the hotel would be honored.

My mother knew that she was down for a defeat; she also knew that a drink at the bar—there was no question of tea—was a good way to save face.

And so the doorman shepherded us to the hotel, my mother protesting all the way.

“I had no idea the city had so changed,” she told the doorman, “it’s been years since I’ve been in the city.”

It was true. Madison, Wisconsin, was lily white. Yes, there were a few black families on the city’s south side, but who went there? More importantly, they knew enough to stay there. And since they were dumped into the east side school district, people on the west side (the toney part of town) were well insulated.

I was sixteen, I was idealistic, and it was clear. My mother and I were completely out of our depths.

Nearing a Breakup with Julian

“Love’s Trilogy?” said Lady. “What is this, Marc, a Christian book!”

“It is a little surprising,” I told her, “since oil and water are far more compatible than I and Christianity. Anyway, this is all about Julian of Norwich—circa 1470—and her revelations, or showings, as she called them. So I figured I would walk as far as I could down the road with Julian, and then, when I could do no more, I’d sit by the side of the road and wish her Godspeed. Which may be today, since we’ve got to two major hurdles—the Trinity and the Passion of Christ—and she soared right over them. Clever woman, though dead these many centuries. And here I am, slacking back and wondering if I can tiptoe around them.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Well, they’re both sort of central to Christianity—at least most people think so—but I’ve never quite bought in. Given that Julian and I got along until the fourth revelation, and there are 86 or so, it means that we’ve barely gotten out of the driveway. Or put it this way: we parted ways on page 13, and the book has 333 pages.”

“What—333! That’s your favorite number! Marc, that’s a sign!”

“Not really, 333 is the page that the last revelation starts, so it goes on for a bit longer….”

“Still a sign!”

“Listen, can we just drop it? I tried, I really tried, but I just can’t.”

“So what’s the problem with the Trinity?”

“The problem is that I used to know why it was important, historically speaking, and I know that everybody got into a big to-do about it, and there were conferences and diets and schisms and charges of heresy and excommunications—the entire religious smorgasbord. But here’s the deal: I’ve never seen the point in it, even when I could understand it, which I mostly couldn’t. I mean, I think it was Karen Armstrong who said, ‘we never really got the Trinity in the West,’ and who also said that a person would have to meditate most of a lifetime to understand the Trinity. Oh, and I was perfectly fine with the old song, “Three in one and one in three, oh, the noble Trinity!”

“Not sure that ever made it down to Puerto Rico,” said Lady.

“Trust me, it was never on Dick Clark’s hit parade. So I muddled around with the Trinity for years, until I discovered that somebody in the 13^th century had come up with a great design for it all, so much so that they were evening wearing it on the shields. In fact, it’s called the Shield of the Trinity, or Scutum Fidei, in Latin.”

“Yeah? What’s it look like?”

“Check it out—and the guy who designed had a serious career waiting for him on Madison  Avenue, many centuries later….”

    

“Not sure I get that….”

“OK—try this….”

   

 “Slightly better. Explanation?”

“Well God is at the center, and goes into the three components of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And vice versa, since the arrows go both way. Which mean that the three elements of the Trinity are also God. But the Holy Ghost is not the Son, or the Father. ‘Est’ being ‘is’ and ‘non est’….”

“Do let me guess that one,” said Lady, more dryly than the Sahara Desert. “Anyway, since we’ve cracked the Trinity, why jettison poor Julian?”

“In the fourth revelation, she waxes ecstatic about the Trinity, and why is it that the Trinity just leaves me cold? Granted, I haven’t put my lifetime into it—but why would a simple creature, by her own definition, care about it? Much less go nutso over it?”

“What does she say?”

“’And in the same showing (revelation) suddenly the Trinity almost filled my heart with joy…’”

“Almost?”

“Bingo—I picked up on that, too. Curiously, the commentator didn’t mention it. But then Julian goes on a riff, at one point describing the Trinity as our ‘everlasting lover.’ Did I tell you ecstatic? Anyway, why should she care? Why should anyone care? And why were all those medieval crusaders putting it on their shield?”

“I’m not sure I’ve met too many people so occupied with the Trinity.”

“I’m not occupied, and that’s the problem. And don’t even get me started about the Passion—which is the whole thing about the crucifixion, loosely—because I don’t get that, either. Though I will say that I can think of no other religion that is as narrative-driven as Christianity. I mean, look at Buddhism: what happens there? Guy sits under tree. Guy receives wisdom. Guy teaches wisdom. End of that story!”

“Right—might be hard to tease out an hour and forty minutes of film on that.”

“It’s been done, but not without some stretching.”

“So what’s your problem with the Passion?”

“Well, Julian gets totally into it. You can almost feel and smell the blood. And of course, I’m such a smart-ass about it all. Tell me that Christ died for my sins, and my first reaction is, ‘how very presumptuous of him.’ Which doesn’t go over big, theologically speaking. Anyway, until Susan suggested that the whole point of the passion was not suffering but vulnerability, the whole thing left me cold. So now I’m lukewarm, which doesn’t feel quite so good, next to Julian’s blast furnace.”

“So you didn’t get anything out of the revelation?”

“Yeah, I did, but it sort of slipped by the commentator, so it’s probably nothing. Anyway, what do you make of this: ‘For it seemed to me that it could well be that I would—by the permission of God, and with his Protection—be tempted by fiends before I died.’ All that, by the way, being tossed off in a parenthesis, whereas I would stick that right up that at the top of the revelation. In fact, I’d bang a concerto out of that drum, and stick the Passion and the Trinity in a footnote.”

“What’s so interesting about that?”

“Seems like a more fertile field than the other two. Interesting that Julian sees the temptation by fiends as something occurring with God’s permission, and with his protection.”

“Free will?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I think it’s more than that. I think that temptation by fiends is necessary, and always has been, throughout the Christian narrative. There’s that snake, you know….”

“I’ve met many a snake,” said Lady.

“No, the one with the apple…”

“That, too, though every snake, you can be sure, has his apple. Haven’t you? Met the snakes, I mean.”

“Seems like I have; I think we all have.”

“And what apples have you bit into? With or without God’s permission and protection?”

I consider this.

“I spent years crippled with self-doubt about my talent. Think that counts?”

“Remember the light and the bushel?”

“I think I refused a lot of love that I should have accepted. How about that?”

“Remember the fatted calf?”

“Not sure that works….”

“It absolutely works. We go off, we stray, we make mistakes, and then, somehow, we get home again. And yes, the brother gets his nose out of joint, but there is also the father, who hasn’t stopped loving, even when his child was straying. The story would have worked better, by the way, if the author had eliminated the other brother, and made the possible rejection internal to the Prodigal Son….”

“Quite possibly….”

“There’s something I’m missing, here,” I told her. “I know there’s a snake I’ve overlooked in the grass, though I’ve grown drunk on his fruit. But what is it? What am I missing?”

“Maybe,” said Lady, “if you get to the end of the road with Julian, you’ll find out.”

Could she be right?

Plodding on with Julian

Who knows why?

I only know that as I was falling, very early on that November morning, I had the twin dreads that what was happening was real, and the equally certain feeling that it was unreal.

To be standing implies control, possibly more than we know or can appreciate. I must know where the floor is, where my legs are; nerves impulses are flying back and forth, muscles are contracting, blood is flowing through my arteries, my lungs are breathing, my heart pumping.

It is, in short, almost miraculous that I can stand at all, and that I have been doing so for more than half a century. And then, six months ago, one system failed, and I fell.

Notice the words: “control,” “failed,” and “fell.”

Julian, in her third revelation, wrote of her illness, but, oddly, she was much more clear about what had happened to her than I was about my own predicament. A paradox—since imagine what I know, and what she did not. If the Internet were not spending the day lounging in bed and eating madeleines, I could refresh the vague memory from childhood of (?) William Harvey, who discovered the circulatory system. Whether it was he or someone else, it was surely later than when Julian wrote, in the last half of the 14^th century. Very likely, in fact, she was thinking of her physical illness—if she even framed it as a physical illness—as something brought about by an imbalance of the four humors.

So she was missing some information, according to our lights. When she got ill, in the second half of her 30^th year, she called the curate, not the doctor. I, in contrast, knew even as I was falling that my blood pressure had plummeted, certainly due to jumping out of bed to stretch out a Charlie horse. Oh, and possibly due to an alcohol / drug interaction.

Julian’s illness, in her view, was sent by God, and was a gift of God: through it, she was better able to experience the suffering of Christ. My fall, in my view, was the result of physiological factors, some of which were out of my control. Julian is healed when the curate asks her to focus on the crucifix: the room becomes dark, and only the crucifix appeared in “ordinary light.” I was healed when doctors, some of them unseen, looked into me, with various sounds and lights and electrical pulses, none of them particularly ordinary, or even available to the layman.

In short, the two illnesses had nothing in common. She turned to her curate; I, in contrast, sent everyone offering spiritual succor scurrying away. But both of us experienced what everyone suffering an illness feels: our control has been taken away. Or, perhaps, is in another’ hand. Or should that be “Another’s?”

God does not speak to me—for which on most days I’m grateful. I therefore do not speak to Him. We do, however, nod courteously on passing. In this, I operate under a sort of British mindset: because we have not been introduced, we can’t possibly speak.

But wasn’t I speaking, in a certain sense? What if we were to imagine pain as a language? What if pain were the language of God? In those days when I had two Hannibal Lector’s munching on the lumbar portion of my spine, what was I thinking? Or, perhaps, what was I saying. Or He? (Male pronoun by convention only….) 

Nothing?

OK, what was I feeling?

Everything and nothing. Rather, one thing, and that was a pain that I can no longer remember.

Like Julian, I would like to have the pain again. I’d like to explore it, map it, analyze all the physiological and emotional changes it wrought on me. But that, of course, would be impossible: only a person not in pain could do that. So pain is a kind of dream world. Instead of “I was in my childhood home but wasn’t,” we have “I have been stabbed by burning Excaliburs while God plunged the archangel into Hell.”

But if I were to return to that dream world of pain for only five minutes: enough to experience it again, and then sneak away to write / remember it, would that really work? Wasn’t it the duration of the pain, how it intruded on my sleep, how it made me tense before any movement—all that produced an accumulated effect. For weeks, I lived in “I will never not be in pain.” I had once lived in a Cezanne; I was now in a Dürer. 

Pain immobilized me better than iron chains ever could. But was it really immobility? Wasn’t it, in fact, stillness? I no longer had to carry the weight of an ordinary day: in fact, I literally could not carry the weight of an ordinary day. And so I was in the back bedroom, and almost as cloistered as Julian had been in her cell, seven centuries before.

I wrote previously that Julian was clearer about her disease than I was. She had not known, after all, any of the facts about her illness. She was free, therefore, to experience her illness as a spiritual affliction or blessing. I was less blessed, and in a sense less free: my knowledge of physiology and pathology allowed me to put up a smokescreen against the divine.

If I shield myself from the divine, at least I am not immune to poetry. Which meant that the metaphor of a broken back made me wonder—had my life become so burdensome? Could I carry my life no longer? Had my life broken my back, and if so, why?

Or was I weak? A neurosurgeon I saw pondered why a 59-year old male should have fractures of such severity—do I have osteoporosis? Is a bone scan necessary, or even worth it?

I am a broken man reading the words of a woman healed three quarters of a millennium ago. Will anyone be around to read either of our words 750 years from now? How will they see us—Julian and I?

My guess is that I will be some transitional figure: Julian, with her spiritual certainty, will be at one pole. But I am somewhere in the middle—poised between physics and metaphysics.

Will the women and men of the future have pieced it, or merged it, together?