House of Prayer No. 2 (24 page)

YOU DON'T TELL ANYONE
about this thing that has been placed on your heart. You don't tell Jennifer, the red-haired girl in
California, who is coming out to see you soon, you don't tell the poet at the university, you don't tell anyone; you go about teaching your writing class in your black academic gown on the Cambridge-style campus, and when you sit in chapel during the week, you think about what has happened to you, and you start praying your ass off.

It is good that Jennifer is coming to see you; you have missed her terribly. Your dog loves her, a good sign. She is concerned on a night when she sees you sitting next to a roaring fire you have built in the fireplace and you are sitting so close your clothes are hot to the touch because you need the heat to work on your bones; this is a cold and damp place in winter, and sometimes at the end of the day the pain is making your eyes water, and the fire seems to help.

You noticed when you were at her house in Venice that she burned votive candles to Saint Monica and she threw the
I Ching
. Visiting the mission in Santa Barbara, you find out she has never been baptized. You take her to chapel, and she sees you struggling with something spiritual, and she tells you one day she would like to learn more about faith. At that time catechism classes are starting on the campus for those wishing to be baptized later by the bishop, and you suggest she go to the classes, and she says she'll go if you go with her, and you do.

Just before the Civil War some Episcopal clergy in the High Church tradition trekked up this mountain in eastern Tennessee and founded this college that Union soldiers subsequently dynamited into pieces that they carried home as trinkets and heirlooms. The event was depicted in the stained glass of All
Saints Chapel when the church was rebuilt after the war. This is a good place to answer the Call. You begin to make little trips to the admissions office of the seminary on campus, and you quietly pick up some materials. One of your next-door neighbors is a middle-aged man with a wife and kids, and you look for him going out to his mailbox so you can “run into him” out there and float him a few questions.

The bishop is coming at Easter, those wishing to be baptized can do so at Easter vigil the night before, you tell Jennifer this is perfect timing for her. She says, Maybe later. You say, Now. Someone will need to present her as a candidate for baptism, and you tell her that you will do it. You have volunteered to read lessons from the Bible, and this time, because it is Easter and the bishop is coming, there will be a full choir and much pageantry and, of course, rehearsal. It is during a rehearsal that this thing happens to you.

You are sitting in a folding chair with your bit of the Old Testament to read in your hand, and a visiting Anglican bishop from the U.K. pulls up a chair and sits beside you. You have seen him around campus. It is a small college, and he has seen you as well. He has heard you are interested in entering the seminary, and this surprises you, but things like this happen at a place like this and you are the type of person that these types of things happen to. Yes, you are interested. Why? he asks, and you have a hard time articulating that you feel you have heard the Call. And do you know what is going to happen to you here? he asks, and you say you've been reading the catalog for the seminary, it looks good—theology, philosophy, literature, music … Yes, he says,
three years of all that. Now, do you know what will happen to you once you leave here? Well … and you really don't have an answer, but he does. He says, They're going to farm you out to some little Podunk parish in Alabama, and over the course of your life you'll reach maybe a hundred and fifty people. Okay, you say. Look, he says, you're the writer in residence here, right? Yes, the Tennessee Williams fellow, you say. So you're a pretty good writer? he asks, and you shrug, and he says, If you have the Call and you're a good writer, you need to keep writing, you'll reach many more people that way than if you go through seminary.

You can't say that a weight lifts off of you or that a beam of light suddenly breaks through the stained glass and shatters something inside you. It is more like a knowing, like when you're navigating a river upstream during a drought, it's easier to navigate when you know to avoid the tributaries and stay to the main channel.

When Jennifer gets baptized, she has tears in her eyes when she leans over for the bishop to pour water from the baptismal font over her pretty red hair. Still emotional back in the pew, she accidentally sets her Book of Common Prayer on fire with her candle. A couple of weeks later she gets a letter from the Episcopal Diocese of East Tennessee. She reads it and says,
Oh my God, look at this
. It's a certificate certifying her baptism, and it certifies that according to the ordinance of our Lord Jesus Christ, she was administered the sacrament of Holy Baptism with water in the name of the Father, Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and because you sponsored her, you are now her Godfather, she is now your Godchild. You find this exciting in a spiritual and a non-spiritual way.

When she goes back to California to work on her book about
her father, you call the wife of her brother and tell her you would like to know the governor's schedule in the coming months, as you will be needing to meet with him in order to ask for his sister's hand in marriage.

YOUR FELLOWSHIP IS FINISHED
. A Mississippi writer named Barry whose work you've always admired calls. He wants to know if you would be interested in teaching at Ole Miss. You drive down to Oxford, Mississippi. Your house is across the street from Rowan Oak, William Faulkner's house. At night you walk your dog over there and look in the windows, but you never see a ghost. The banging against the window from the inside late one night was just the radiators coming on, and you leaped back, and your dog ran all the way ahead of you home.

It is a good town, a welcoming place where two of your favorite writers live. You leave the back door unlocked because you are in the South and people are always coming in without knocking, and that's how you meet Larry, another Mississippi writer you admire, one night when you come in the kitchen and he's sitting there smoking with a bottle of bourbon on the table and he says,
Hey
.

Barry and his wife, Susan, take you and your fiancée out to dinner and have you over to their house for Easter dinner. One of your favorite writings of Barry's is the introduction to a pocketbook edition of the book of Mark, which includes a poem that you have taped to the wall of your office. Jennifer taught with Barry back in Bennington, and he is fond of her; when he hears
you two are getting married, he sends a note to her reporting that he is crestfallen with the news, having always envisioned spending his later years as an old man watching the sunset from a condo balcony in Palm Springs while she combed Grecian Formula through his hair. He says he imagined he would be wearing a lot of turquoise.

You and your Godchild get married in California. During the wedding reception, Melvin presents you with a metal pot and a large metal spoon on the dance floor. Melvin is mindful of the time that he and his wife had gone with you and a blind date who you never saw again down to a biker bar to hear some live music and during a protracted drum solo you had gone into the attached restaurant kitchen serving fried fish and she-crab soup and had taken down a pot and a large cooking spoon and returned onstage to the biker bar and yelled
Conga line!
into an open mike and had led several tables of bikers and biker chicks conga-lining through the place. Melvin says it was one of the bravest things he had ever seen, its audacity the only thing keeping you all from getting shot, cut, or killed. You end your wedding reception banging on the pot with the spoon, conga-lining on a terrace overlooking the Pacific Ocean, leading your new wife and all of her friends and family and all of your best friends from all over the world, many of whom do not know each other, though later at a restaurant after the reception, standing and telling how they met you, for most, they met you in a bar.

Back in Mississippi, you start locking the back door, having just come back from your honeymoon, where you, after drinking an entire pot of coffee and taking some pain pills, hiked five miles
across the floor of a volcano's crater. You finish consummating your marriage in every room of the house, including the backseat of the Cadillac parked in your very own carport.

THERE'S STILL THIS MATTER OF THE CALL
on your heart. You attend the Catholic church wondering if Walker Percy was right about the Church being the true church. You try to talk to the priest about personal ministries, but maybe you spook him, because he acts as if you are trying to sell him something he doesn't want to buy. You've never read Kierkegaard, and now you do, and you'd like to talk to someone about despair, is it really a sin, and you go to the Episcopal church, but the priest there one Sunday says Dr. Seuss is one of his favorite writers, and he preaches a sermon while turning the pages of a Dr. Seuss book, and you don't go back.

When your time is up in Mississippi, you are sad to go. You and your dog drive across the country to meet your wife in California, where she has gone ahead to find you a place for you all to live while she finishes her book. In Albuquerque you sneak your dog into a Holiday Inn Express, and in the morning two policemen are knocking on your door and wanting to talk to you. During the night, someone broke into every car in the parking lot except yours, they suspect a Mexican gang, but they're curious about you. You don't know what to tell them, but in your heart you're sure it has something to do with the Texas tags and the Saint Christopher statue glued to the dashboard.

YOU AND YOUR NEW WIFE RENT A COTTAGE
on the old Vanderlip Estate, begun in the 1920s as the Hamptons of the West. Your cottage is a one-room studio with no heat, set amidst the overgrown gardens of the mansion, the Villa Narcissa. Teenage gang members from San Pedro jump the walls at night and roam the property to see the ghosts, particularly that of the Vanderlip daughter locked in a private asylum there after an illicit affair with a black man, and the glowing dogs. There is an old casino on the property, casitas, stables, and a gamekeeper's house. There are scorpions and rattlesnakes, abundant peacocks, and hundreds of cypress-lined steps leading to a temple with an otherworldly view of the Pacific Ocean and Catalina Island. Elin Vanderlip, the grande dame, tells you of the many people who have visited since the 1930s, the actors, the heads of state, the writers, of whom you are just one.

You write a novel about an orphan who is raised by a religious prophet, and the orphan turns to a life of crime, becoming a counterfeiter and switching identities with a black-sheep scion of a faded-money family, and narrowly escapes being murdered by a crooked family lawyer dressed in a Santa Claus costume. Nan Talese calls you and tells you it's gorgeous, beautiful writing, and she has absolutely no idea what is going on in the book, and, come to think of it, neither do you.