Providence (9 page)

         
Yes, that’s certainly
the question. How could I reconcile the hour of sight that I’d been given at Gethsemani with what followed? I couldn’t. It simply didn’t make any sense. Here’s the way I was thinking about it: God wanted me to say yes to the monastic life, and then he kicked me out. It made no sense in those terms and still makes no sense in those terms. It took me thirty years of searching to find the terms in which it does make sense, and we’ll get to that in its proper place in the story.…

No, I’d rather not give you any hints at this point. Well, I’ll give you this one hint. I’ve avoided the word
vision
to describe what happened, because what I experienced was not “a vision” in the sense of … This was not a
Christian
vision. I didn’t have a glimpse of heaven or of
throngs of angels or of Jesus or Mary. There was simply nothing Christian about it. It was irrelevant to Christianity. Christ said, “My kingdom is not of this world,” and for two thousand years everybody knew that he meant exactly what he said. What I saw that day was not His kingdom. Not, not, not, not, not. What I saw that day was the
world,
and Christ never made anything clearer than the fact that he was not of
this
world, he belonged to the world
above.

At Menninger’s they’d given me a choice of therapists from their list of Menninger-trained psychoanalysts all over the country, and I chose one in Chicago, because I had friends there—Jerry Long and Bob Cahill, who, like me, had given up on the Writers’ Institute and were now at Loyola. I’d missed a semester by going to Gethsemani, and I decided to try to make up as much as I could at summer school, so, after a few weeks in Omaha, I headed to Chicago to find an apartment.

By this time I’d achieved some psychological distance from the ordeal. I’d had to stand off from the religious life, for safety’s sake, because I no longer knew where I stood with God. It no longer made sense to invest too much of myself in His cause. Now, in order to rebuild my shattered self-esteem, I had to invest myself in something else, which was writing. I’d failed as a saint, but—

Yes, that’s a good point. I said a few minutes ago that I’d imagined becoming a saint was simply a matter of choice, something you could either choose to do or not,
because if you loved God, God had to love you back. This had proved to be not the case. But writing was different—presumably. Unlike becoming a saint, becoming a writer is something that’s entirely in your hands. If you have the talent and the determination, you can do it. You don’t need to be loved, you don’t need to take a Rorschach test, you don’t need anyone’s permission. So this was how I planned to rebuild my self-esteem. Once again, I don’t mean I figured this all out consciously. I mean that I had by now ceased to think of my future exclusively in terms of sanctity and had instead begun to think of it in terms of writing, and this is why.

Oh, you don’t have to remind me, I’m not going to neglect that. I was supposed to be in Chicago because a certain psychoanalyst was there. This was Dr. Zirpoli—Robert, if my memory is correct. My relationship to him was false from the start. I couldn’t have known it, but I’m surprised he didn’t—or perhaps he did and considered it simply as a clinical problem to be solved. With the possible exception of something like behavior modification (which is more a matter of retraining than of therapy in the classical sense), psychotherapy is useless for someone who thinks he’s not in need of it. If I’d been honest, I would have said, “Look, Dr. Zirpoli, this is all a waste of time. There’s nothing wrong with me, so it’s stupid for me to sit here with you hour after hour, week after week.” Now that I think about it, the chances are good that I actually
did
say something like this to him. Doubtless he
replied by asking me why I didn’t just walk out if I felt this way. See if you can guess how I would have answered him.…

No? I think you could if you tried.

I would have answered him this way: “The reason I don’t walk out is that my spiritual director thought this is what I should do. I don’t necessarily agree with his judgment, but it’s not my place to gainsay it.” This is what Dr. Zirpoli would have called (quite correctly) a rationalization. I couldn’t confront the fact that I didn’t have the self-assurance to walk out, so I blamed it on God—indirectly, through Father Louis.

Zirpoli was a fairly strict adherent to the Freudian tradition. I mean he was totally nondirective and nonreactive. For example, if I had told him (as I probably did) that my father thought I was a queer, he would simply have sat there, or he might have said, “Oh yes?” It was up to me to figure out where to go from there. He wasn’t going to ask, for example, if I’d ever had any feelings of sexual attraction to a person of my own gender. I would’ve taken that as a sign that the presence or absence of such feelings had some bearing on the matter, and that wouldn’t do.

The psychoanalyst isn’t there to provide reassurance. He’s there to provide a mirror in which you can see yourself. And at this point what I saw in the mirror had little relation to the image that was actually there. I was like an emaciated anorexic who looks in the mirror and sees someone who is fat, fat, fat, fat, fat.

What was wrong with me was not my sexual orientation. What was wrong with me was that I was so profoundly
insecure that I needed someone else to tell me what my sexual orientation
was.
I had no
inner
assurance on the subject of my own identity. But of course I didn’t see this at all. When I left his office after a session like this, I would be thinking: “Oh my God, maybe I
am
a queer.”

After a year of this, I was living in a state of perpetual anxiety and inner tumult, which I imagine is par for the psychoanalytic course. When it comes to psychoanalysis, a year is just scratching the surface.

Meanwhile I fell in love, and this presented a crisis on several levels. In those days, for an earnest young man like me, to fall in love was to get married, and to get married would be to say good-bye to any possible return to the Trappist life. Perhaps even more distressing, to get married would be to adopt a life-style that, for a fundamentalist Roman Catholic, is spiritually second-rate. I assure you it’s true. Heavens, read St. Paul! Marriage is something you do if you must, something you do if you can’t manage without that filthy stuff called sex. Better to marry, Paul says, than to burn. Nowadays Catholics downplay this message, but it’s there, loud and clear: Virgins occupy a distinctly higher spiritual plane than married folks.…

Yes, this seems to contradict what I was saying a minute
ago, that I was no longer investing myself so totally in the cause of God. But in fact there’s no contradiction here; if I’d still been investing myself totally in the cause of God, I wouldn’t have allowed myself to fall in love at all. But once I’d fallen in love, I immediately began to question what I was doing. As I say, I simply didn’t know what I was about, who I was, or what I wanted.

In addition to these reservations, there was this: Would I, as a married man, be able to pursue a career as a writer? I remember asking the poet Paul Carroll what he thought about this. He was clearly doubtful but wasn’t comfortable giving me advice about such a thing. I asked a painter friend—himself married. He said, “If you don’t marry Katherine, you’ll always regret it.” Believe it or not, I clung fervently to this advice. I gave this person’s opinion far more weight than my own inclinations, because I wasn’t sure I could trust them.

So one day I walked into Dr. Zirpoli’s office and said, “Well, I’m going to get married!”

He was completely flabbergasted. He said, “I thought we agreed at the outset that you wouldn’t make any major life decisions without reviewing them here.”

It was my turn to be flabbergasted. It hadn’t occurred to me that this was any of his concern. He suddenly ceased to be nondirective and told me in no uncertain terms that any marriage I entered into at this point would end in disaster. He couldn’t have been more right, but I certainly didn’t see any grounds for this dire prediction. In fact, I suspected him of simply wanting to keep me as a patient, which meant keeping me as my father’s little boy.

However, since I’d created what he considered to be a
state of emergency, I agreed to start coming twice a week instead of once. I frankly don’t remember what that accomplished, if anything. You can’t make a crash course out of psychoanalysis. I’m sure he did his best and that he was moved by a genuine concern for me, but I was beyond help at that point. Not beyond it: simply not yet ready to receive it.

Someone whose self-esteem depends on being perfect is incapable of maintaining a relation of intimacy with anyone for very long. This is because, no matter how hard you try, you’re going to slip up occasionally. In the beginning, before you’ve made any mistakes, you say to yourself, “Wow, Katherine thinks I’m wonderful, perfect, so naturally she loves me. That’s why anybody loves anybody, because they think they’re perfect.” Then one time you slip up and you say to yourself, “Well, there goes a little bit of the gloss. Katherine now knows I’m only ninety-nine percent perfect; obviously her love has to be somewhat diminished, but I’ll make it up to her by being twice as perfect, and she’ll soon forget this small lapse.” But this is just not a policy that’s going to work for years and years. The gloss inevitably wears completely off of anybody, and this is disastrous for someone whose self-worth is bound up with being perfect.

After four years the matter was no longer in doubt:
Katherine
knew
I wasn’t perfect. This wasn’t important to
her,
mind you, this was important to
me.
My never-abundant self-confidence was completely gone, and everything else went with it. From the outset I’d been anything but a sexual athlete. I was still terrified of sex, still afraid to give myself over to sexual feelings, still worried that God must surely turn up his nose at such sweaty goings-on. Now, feeling completely worthless, far from being an athlete, I was a pathetic cripple, and this didn’t work at all well for Katherine, who considered herself to be in the Olympic class. Somehow we struggled on, year after year, I vowing to improve, to become bigger and stronger, and instead growing weaker every day.

A battered wife will invest all her feelings of self-worth in her battering husband. She has totally accepted her husband’s valuation of her, and this is why she stays: She hopes to redeem herself in her husband’s eyes—and therefore in her own. I thought I loved Katherine desperately, but in fact my desperation was only to redeem myself in her eyes—and of course the more desperate I felt, the more pathetic I became.

When the youngest of our four children was well into toddlerhood, Katherine began to roam. She made no secret of this. She spent long evenings out “driving” and “thinking,” and I absolutely believed that this was what she was doing, because I couldn’t afford to believe anything else. One night I came home from a business trip, and she told me she wanted a divorce. I still didn’t get it, and she finally had to draw me a picture. She didn’t just want to get rid of me, she’d found herself another man—a
real
man—and they were going to get married as soon as she got her divorce and he got his. She had it all worked out. I could move into another bedroom until it was over or until the house was sold, whichever came first, then—

Fortunately, I found a sliver of a backbone in my body and said no thanks to that. My bag was there, all packed, so I just went and said good-bye to the kids and walked out.

Well, this was truly the end of the world for me, and for the first time in my life I didn’t know where to turn. The universe was empty, the future as bleak as a prison sentence. I thought about suicide, and if I hadn’t still believed in heaven and hell (and it’s hell for suicides, of course), I might have done more than think about it.

I don’t think there’s any loneliness greater than the loneliness to be found in a bad marriage. In solitary confinement, everyone knows you’re lonely and feels sorry for you. In a bad marriage loneliness is your darkest secret, one you dare not even share with your spouse. But now the secret was out. Everyone knew—and suddenly I had people to talk to for the first time in many years.

A young coworker by the name of Michael Carden listened
to my tale of woe … and chuckled. A bachelor and something of a lady-killer, this was someone whose experience and carnal wisdom were decades beyond my own. He assured me that it was not the end of the world for me, that in two months or six months I would feel nothing but relief to be out from under the burden of this terrible marriage, and he was quite right.

Again (and as always) you have to understand that I’m giving you the understanding of these events that I have now. My understanding of them at the time was quite different. What I’d told Michael Carden was that the failure of the marriage was due entirely to my sexual inadequacies, and this is what had made him chuckle. Katherine’s expectations, Michael explained, were romantic nonsense, were the expectations of someone who hadn’t been around much in the world as it is. Wild, passionate lovemaking among the long-married is a fantasy only Hollywood screenwriters believe in. She’d find this out after being married to her “real man” for a couple of years. In other words, according to Michael, Katherine’s unrelenting assault on my feelings of self-worth was much more to blame for the failure of our marriage than my own shortcomings. Naturally I was delighted to adopt this interpretation of the affair.