The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ Read online

  Living within such a spiritual sanctuary has an effect on you over the years. Just knowing such a marriage can exist refashions the way you look at life. For me, it put limits on what I could call illusory or meaningless. Other men could believe that subjective experience is by nature relative and unreliable. Other men could reason from suffering to nihilism. Not me. Our marriage gave undeniable substance to the inner experience of true love, and true love in turn shone a light on the redemptive possibilities even of tragedy. Even the kingdom of evil came to seem to me like only the empty space where true love might have been. And when, over time, I had reasoned my way to God, it was our marriage, in part, that made me trust my reasoning. I trusted myself because I had recognized love when I saw it, and it was the fact of our long love that had slowly revealed to me a greater love than ours, the love that was our love’s source and inspiration. It was as if our marriage had guided me through my days from a realm beyond the ordinary, the way a lodestar shines from deepest space yet nonetheless leads you home.

  All this would only dawn on me and shape me over the course of decades. At the start, our relationship was mostly what these things are: sex and giddiness and setting up house. I met Ellen at a good time in my life, even a jolly time, relatively speaking. The depression and anger that had marked my first year at school had receded. Bumming around the country and working at the radio station had fed a little of that hunger for Experience that bedeviled me so much. I was glad to be back at school and, if I was still more or less vamping my way through higher education, I was also beginning to discover what I needed and wanted to learn. I was living in San Francisco, a lovely city. I was dating several girls whom I liked. Things were going all right for me. Finding Ellen just seemed like the natural next step in a good life.

  But I think I already knew that the good life wouldn’t continue. I think I already knew, deep down, that something was wrong with me. That depression I’d experienced my first months at school: now that I’d gotten some distance from it, I could look back and see it had been a really bad business. The long sleeps and the heavy drinking, the endless fevers and sunken-eyed solitude. Once you have felt that tide of darkness rising in you, you always know it might rise again.

  It did rise from time to time, not full-blown depression maybe, but sorrow for no reason; anger for no reason; ugly, tormenting thoughts and a mood of persistent, unshakable melancholy. I called it the Bola—after that string with a weight on each end that some South American Indians used to use for a throwing weapon—because it seemed to come out of nowhere and wrap itself around my throat, growing tighter and tighter until I felt it would strangle me. Sometimes I thought it was connected to the writing process. The Bola would often hit me as I was finishing a book and I would wonder if my subconscious was punishing me for succeeding at something when I knew my father wanted me to fail. Other times, though, it seemed to just be there, inside me, less like a bola, really, than like an ensnaring interior spider web, interwoven strands of rage and sorrow and twisted sexual fantasies and imaginary arguments with my parents that would replay in my brain obsessively.

  When I graduated college, Ellen and I moved to Manhattan. We found an apartment on the west side, a tiny place but in a nice neighborhood and renting cheap. My parents gave me a little money to start my life with, enough so I didn’t have to get a job right away. Ellen continued college at Barnard. I began to try to sell the last novel I’d written and to write a new one. In both enterprises, I was hampered by the fact that I had no idea what I was doing, and no one who could explain it to me.

  I had no mentor. I had never had a mentor, only an anti-mentor in my father. I had had no one—no one I trusted—to teach me even the simplest things about starting out in life, or beginning a career. I did not know there was such a thing as a career. I did not know that you could expect to move through it in stages, to learn from your failures and build upon your successes. I did not know that you could seek advice and help from older people. In fact, my father had left me so leery of authority, I wouldn’t have dreamed of consulting my elders about anything. To me, they all seemed like bitter and crafty competitors out to trip me up.

  I did not even know about the virtues of hard work. This seems almost unbelievable to me now, but it’s true. My father had taught me that talent was like a delicate mechanism that would break or wear out from overuse. I was a hard worker by nature. I worked hard when I was working certainly; I crafted every sentence with care and went over it and over it. But I did not know that you could wake up earlier and accomplish more; that you could work weekends if you had to; that you could strive to achieve not just excellence but also prosperity and that the two need not be in conflict. I didn’t know anything about anything really and I did not have anyone who could teach me.

  The new novel I began to work on was called Face of the Earth. It was, if I say so myself, an excellent idea for a story. Inspired by my wanderings around the country, it concerned two young drifters, a wan intellectual type and a brash braggart. The braggart spins a yarn that may or may not be true about his pursuit of a woman who may or may not exist. In trying to get at the truth of the story, the intellectual not only falls in love with the woman in the braggart’s story but begins to suspect that the braggart murdered her. It was a good plot. It was meant to deal with my thoughts on storytelling, with the difficulty of distinguishing reality from narrative, and with the way sexual desire sweeps us into the greater life and death of nature. It suffered from lyrical writing and a lot of youthful mythological symbolism—and from the fact that I still often worked late at night into early morning. It’s a terrible time to write. Every awful word you put down seems like a masterstroke. Still, all that said, the book was a leap for me, the best thing I’d written up to that point.

  As for selling my previously completed novel, the last book I’d written while in college . . . well, I knew I needed an agent but I didn’t have the first clue how to find one. Instead of writing polite query letters the way you’re supposed to, I went around the city barging unannounced into agents’ offices with my boxed manuscript under my arm. I would explain how talented I was to whomever would listen, then demand that the agent read my work. Receptionists gaped at me in comical shock. Some of the top agents in New York actually came out of their offices to see me out of pure curiosity. One guy took me by the elbow and virtually hurled me out into the hall, shouting after me, “This isn’t how it’s done!” In spite of him, I actually did find an agent this way eventually, but she couldn’t sell the book anywhere.

  My money began to run out. I took odd jobs and managed to sell an article here and there for added cash, but I couldn’t stretch out my funds forever. I became frustrated and the tide of depression began to rise in me again.

  The city, meanwhile, was in a tailspin. The serial killer Son of Sam was terrorizing the public. I sold an article about the effects of his attacks, interviewing some of the traumatized friends of his victims. I can still remember their shocked and gutted gazes. The sight of them never left me. A winter of brutal cold had given way to a summer of relentless heat. Puerto Rican nationalists were disrupting the workday with bomb threats. Ellen was forced to come home from her summer job more than once when her building was shut down.

  On my twenty-third birthday, July 13, the metropolis was plunged into darkness during a citywide blackout. Ellen and I had saved up painfully for a special birthday dinner in a fancy restaurant. We were eating when I glanced out the front window and saw a cascading shadow wipe the brilliance from the skyline. The restaurant management strove to keep the customers happy by handing out free wine in the dark. Poor as we were, we were only too eager to take advantage of the offer. Riots and looting were breaking out in the northern slums, but it was quiet enough where we were. As the blacked-out city burned around us, we went dancing home together along the sidewalk with me singing “They All Laughed” at the top of my lungs.

  One of the local tabloids ran a cartoon soon afterward that showed the island of Manhattan sinking into the harbor while businessmen paddled for shore on their briefcases. That was pretty much how I felt about the city. New York can be a wonderful town, but it’s never really suited me. Too much stone; too much noise; not enough opportunity for solitude. I wanted out. I was relieved when my older brother helped me land a job on a newspaper in a bureau in the rural exurbs, a hundred miles away. Ellen had graduated college by then, so we moved north. We took up residence in a gatekeeper’s cottage on an estate. It was little more than a shack really, but it was up on a hill with a view of a horse paddock and the fields beyond. I loved it there.

  I loved newspaper work too: the excitement and, of course, the Experience. Working the county’s small towns, I got to cover every kind of story from murders to political shenanigans to the occasional county fair.

  One morning I was sitting in the run-down, smoke-filled cubicle that was the bureau’s office just off the main street of the county seat. I heard a call come in over the fizzling police radio that sat on top of an old filing cabinet. I rushed out the back door into the parking lot, jumped into my elderly Volvo, and raced to the scene. I got there just in time to see state troopers and sheriff’s deputies carrying the body of a young woman out of the woods. She had been hitchhiking, just as my Ellen once had.

  The police caught her killer quickly. It turned out he was the boyfriend of one of the richest girls in town, the wayward daughter of a local horse breeder. She lived with her lover in a house on her dad’s vast estate. Her friends on the estate knew the guy was creepy. They’d begged her to break up with him, but she wouldn’t do it. She liked the fact that the relationship made her father angry. At one point, desperate, her friends had called the newspaper—called me specifically. The boyfriend had been ar
rested for exposing himself in the local pornographic bookstore. They wanted me to write about it. They hoped that seeing the story in the paper would bring the girl to her senses. It wasn’t news, so I couldn’t run it. Too bad. Eventually, the horse breeder’s daughter and her crazy boyfriend had a quarrel. He stormed off and took his anger out on the hitchhiker, beating her to death. It was a story straight out of Raymond Chandler.

  The horse breeder was eager to avoid being connected to the murder. The powerful head of a prominent family, he turned to the county sheriff for help. The sheriff was a dour man, who hated nothing so much as the local press. He was only too willing to protect the horse breeder from any pesky and intrusive reporters, namely me. He ordered that roadblocks be set up, manned by deputies in patrol cars, blocking every entrance to the horse breeder’s sprawling estate. No one could get through without being identified by the deputies. And no one on the farm was answering the phone.

  There was, however, a young woman working for the Sheriff’s Department who had taken a liking to me. We used to chat with each other over the pinball machine in the local diner. One night soon after the murder, as I was sitting alone in the bureau, the phone rang. When I answered, a woman’s voice said, “Step out the back door. A black car will pull up. Get in the backseat.” I hung up the phone. I laughed out loud. I thought, I’ve been waiting to get a phone call like that my whole life! I felt as if I had actually become Philip Marlowe. Experience!

  Sure enough, when I stepped out the back door into the parking lot, the woman from the Sheriff’s Department drove up in a long black car. When I got in the backseat, she instructed me to lie down on the floor. I fitted my body uncomfortably over the drive shaft tunnel and she covered me with a blanket, head to toe. Then, with me hidden from view, she drove past the sheriff’s roadblocks up to the horse farm. I sat with the horse breeder’s daughter’s friends and they told me the whole story of her ill-fated romance. The next morning, it was splashed all over our front page. The sheriff was furious. I loved newspaper work.

  But it was an all-consuming job, morning to midnight. For the first time in years, I was unable to write fiction every day. The most disturbing thing about this was how happy it made me. Getting out of the house, working an interesting job, being with colleagues I liked, making money—these things gave me enormous pleasure, as they would any young man. The newspaper forced me to realize that writing novels, the work I knew I was born for, was not good for me, psychologically speaking.

  The writing life is brutal on a wounded mind. It really is. So much time spent alone. So much time spent in self-reflection. Emotional wounds heal in other people’s hearts but you have to reopen yours and examine them in order to re-create their painful feelings on the page. Ugly, twisted, vicious thoughts flitter through other people’s minds, but you have to seize yours and hold them to the light in order to understand the soul’s shadowy corners. You have to shred your comfortable pieties. You have to tear your illusions to feathers and rags. When you’re working well, you become bad company, inward-turning, querulous, obsessed. There are plenty of harder jobs, I know. Homemakers, soldiers, cops, firemen, laborers—they all put in tougher days than writers do. But the writing life, so help me, could drive even a sane man crazy. If you’re half crazy already, as I was, it will drive you completely out of your mind. It was healthy for me to be away from it.

  I should have stayed away. I should have enjoyed the time. I should have put in a few years, five years, say, as a journalist. I could have learned more about politics, crime, and business from the inside. Established a reputation. Then I could have written a novel—probably a better novel than I was capable of at the moment. I just couldn’t do it that way, though. Again, I was so ignorant of how a career works, how a life works. My father had always told me that a writer who takes a job will never get around to writing. One day, he’ll wake up and he’ll be sixty-five with a gold watch for retirement and an unfinished novel in his desk drawer. Writers write, Dad always said; and if you’re not writing, you’re not a writer. I sort of half understood that this was more of his bad advice—why he presumed to know anything about it at all, I can’t say—but the idea frightened me nonetheless. As much as I loved the newspaper, every day I spent there felt to me like another day closer to that gold watch and failure.

  Then my girlfriend sold my novel. Ellen had taken a secretarial job at a literary agency in Manhattan. She asked her bosses if she might send Face of the Earth around to publishers and they said yes, go ahead. To everyone’s surprise, including mine, she got an offer on the book—a tiny offer but from one of the most famous editors at one of the best literary houses in town. With a check for a hot $7,500 in my hand, I did what any mentally unbalanced young writer would do under the circumstances: I quit my job and began to plan my next novel.

  That was pretty stupid, but I did something else at the same time. I married Ellen—and that may have been the single best idea I ever had.

  We’d been living together for four years. My original sense that we were interlocking pieces in some cosmic jigsaw puzzle had never left me. I didn’t think much of ceremonies and rituals, of course. They were relics of an outmoded past, and I was far above such things. But I agreed to a gathering of about a dozen family members and friends at the cottage, and a few quick words from a preacher out on the lawn. It drizzled all that day. But just before the ceremony was due to begin, the rain stopped and a single golden beam of sunlight shone down on the spot by the willow tree where the ceremony was to take place. Ellen and I stood together in that light while a minister from a Unitarian church pronounced us man and wife. “We gather together in the presence of that power whom some people call God and others call nature and for whom some have no name at all . . .,” he said. “The Church of Amorphous Rambling,” one of my brothers called it.

  The moment the service was over, however, I realized I had been wrong, utterly wrong. It struck me full force right away: the ceremony did matter. It was like a living story representing a truth that could not be otherwise told. It changed something in me on the instant. It created a mysterious but tremendous difference in the relationship between my girl and me.

  I left the lawn. I walked back into the cottage. I went into the bathroom and closed the door. I looked at myself in the mirror, a married man. Dazed but euphoric, I raised my hand and gave myself the high sign: thumb and forefinger curled together into an o for okay!

  I was a fool in so many ways and really half insane by then. But somehow—and not for the last time in my life—I had managed to stumble into the great good thing.

  CHAPTER 10

  GOING CRAZY

  Our wedding day—then our honeymoon in Italy—were just about the last happy days I would have for the next four years.

  The publication of Face of the Earth was a disaster. My famous editor was a brilliant and courtly gentleman but also a raging drunk. When he invited me to his apartment so we could go over the manuscript together, I was thrilled—until I saw the shambling, quivering wreck of a man he became in his off hours. Before the book made it to the stores, he left the publishing house and went into rehab. Without the famous editor to shepherd my novel into the world, it was universally ignored. The blow to my already fragile ego was so catastrophic I didn’t even feel it. I simply buried the broken pieces of myself in comforting and increasingly grandiose fantasies.

  These fantasies had been growing in me over the years, winding round my mental life like cobwebs and vines. The darker my internal world became, the more I soothed myself by hunkering within these dreams. My father’s caustic and belittling voice had become an inner voice to me now, and to counter it I developed a defiantly overblown sense of myself, a brittle narcissism not unlike his own. This grandiosity even crept into my prose style. I had tried hard to teach myself to write sentences that were clean and clear, but now my work was becoming flowery and pompous. My ambitions grew flowery and pompous too—cosmic; impossible. I’m sure this was not the first time this ever happened to a young artist, but I couldn’t break out of the prison of my own conceit. Its atmosphere slowly stifled not only my sense of humor but my sense of reality as well.