All This Heavenly Glory (17 page)

S
HE’D BEEN SOBER A WHILE, but some things hadn’t changed. Charlotte had heard it said many times in the program that A.A. wasn’t a hotbed of mental
health, but this hadn’t stopped her from using it as a dating service. Early on it was a big draw. There were a lot of good-looking
drunks, but around her sixth year of sobriety, after a particularly horrific date with vet another unmedicated bipolar alcoholic
in which she felt compelled to hurl herself from the car about five minutes after he picked her up, she declared herself a
born-again virgin and decided to wait until she fell in love, a risky proposition given that it hadn’t happened once thus
far. She had started to take baby steps toward her career goals but still struggled with the word
career
. Not to mention the word
goals
. Charlotte had interests but was never terribly
ambitious
(another word she had trouble with), and all three of these words seemed definitive. (And let’s not even get started on the
word
success,
because Charlotte has always thought something along the lines of How the hell do you define that? According to who: Sometimes
if she was able to get out of bed before nine she felt her day was already an unqualified success.) She wanted to be a filmmaker,
but what if she wanted to write a novel? What if she suddenly overcame her stage fright and learned how to play an instrument
and got asked to sing backup for Tenacious D? How could she say no to that, except what if her movie was opening the same
night as the Tenacious D tour and she had to decide between the two? Couldn’t you sing backup for Tenacious D and also be
a filmmaker? Who decided that you couldn’t? Someone who was too tired to figure out what to call someone who was a filmmaking
backup singer? Why did
career
have to imply only one thing? Why did
goals
seem to imply an end? What happens if you meet all your goals? Do you like, shoot off into space or something and burst into
a worldwide fireworks display announcing goal completion and then cease to exist? What if she became completely disenchanted
with anything remotely related to art or entertainment and suddenly became obsessed with backgammon? What if the CIA called
and the CIA said,
We have a job that we think only you can do?
What if she stumbled into Baskin Robbins one day and felt a calling?

So it was that Charlotte prayed to the god of her “understanding” (quotes because her understanding had to date been so murky)
that she would maybe calm down about the career/goals/ ambition thing long enough to make something happen in at least one
of these fields and that she would be open to meeting someone relatively normal who would make her want to stay in the car
(and that she would even recognize someone relatively normal if he crossed her path). Although she did not belong to any religion,
she had heard various interpretations of the eleventh step over the years about what it was okay to pray for (the eleventh
step of Alcoholics Anonymous suggests praying only for knowledge of god’s will, but it also suggests meditation, which to
Charlotte went as far as turning off the TV), i.e., go ahead and pray for whatever you want but it might be a better idea
to pray only for god’s will. Charlotte tended to struggle with this as she found it difficult to avoid the idea that god’s
will for everyone was to give up all material possessions and head for the farthest starving or war-torn country, not considering
that maybe god, if he had a mind, and if he were a he and if he were only concerned with this sort of altruism, maybe had
some more appropriate type of service in his mind for Charlotte, like maybe making a film that would compel millions of people
to go out and do his will, which only muddles things a little more for Charlotte because she’d really rather make a film that
would inspire people however it inspired them, but also because she wonders how she’d necessarily even know if she were making
a film that inspired anyone at all, whether to do god’s will or whatever else, or if it matters if she knows, which is often
the real question she has about god’s will, whether she prays for it or not, does it even matter if she knows, if it’s being
done anyway, and what about if god really is punishing, what if she’s completely wrong about god insofar as the one thing
she holds to is that god has to want what’s good, even if she might not know what that is above and beyond generally treating
people well. Further suggestions she’s heard about prayer are that if you absolutely have to get specific, it’s not a bad
idea to pray for other people, particularly if you have resentments toward them (which gets into a weird area during moments
when Charlotte’s resentment is actually toward god), or for world peace, or the good health and fortune of loved ones (which
gets into a very long list that Charlotte had to write down because she couldn’t remember everyone and was always adding people
so that it became a list of everyone she’d ever known to the point where her prayers started taking forty-five minutes every
night and she fell asleep saying them, after which she decided god had to know who she loved without her reading off the list
on a daily basis), things like this, which Charlotte did, but her logic was that if god wasn’t answering those prayers, he
may as well not answer a few more. It was like reverse psychology, but on god, which is both absurd and pathetic, but such
was the state of Charlotte’s relationship with god at the time, a logic arrived upon after a seemingly unfair number of family
members became stricken with one fatal illness or another. She was aware that prayers for things like work or romance tended
to be aided by some sort of action on the part of the praying person,
Faith without works is dead,
as it were, as opposed to prayers for sick people or whatever, where it seems more obvious that while this is a nice thing
to do, if you’re not a doctor, but plenty of times even if you are a doctor, really you can only do so much to help sick people
recover, and she hoped that if there was a god who had a mind, he might go,
All right, that person has suffered enough, and you guys have been asking so nicely
or whatever. This actually made sense to her, sometimes, until these ridiculous numbers of relatives started getting sick,
and then, not so much, but she kept asking, because, if nothing else, it seemed unlikely to hurt.

So after the prayer, Charlotte became friendly with this guy Russell, who she saw at first as just a friend, a very casual
friend, someone she was getting to know in a strictly platonic, see-you-at-the-next-party kind of thing. It went on like that
for a few months and she felt certain that there was no attraction of any kind, because of his overall style (big thick sweaters
she might have really liked in 1990) and because of his overall looks (cute enough but not in a way that personally appealed
to her at all) and because of his overall having a regular job and especially because of his overall political views, which
she understood to be slightly right-leaning, and although this led to some lively conversations, Charlotte felt that there
was no way she could ever be involved with someone who planned to vote for a candidate who had an overall demeanor not unlike
that of a four-year-old who just found out he was getting skipped into second grade. When the election came, Russell admitted
to having come to his senses and changing his vote, for a candidate who was at least smart, if not necessarily more promising,
which brings up a lesser-of-two-evils sort of issue, not that it would matter in the end anyway, in any case, Russell’s vote
change served as his reentry into a genus of people she could in some theoretical universe date, as opposed to someone she
could in no universe of any kind date.

A few months went by where they passed at parties and such and exchanged occasional hello or goodbye hugs but overall Charlotte
still wasn’t feeling him (and therefore, she hadn’t really been taking any kind of notes on whether or not he was feeling
her) and went about her business and then one day at another party Russell made a comment to Charlotte about how she struck
him as being really kind of healthy, in an emotional way, which wasn’t completely surprising—she knew she was fairly adroit
at making people think she had it going on in that way (which gets into another whole thing about whether that was really
a useful trait, which in fact she was pretty sure it wasn’t, considering that maybe she could actually get some help from
people, if she were willing to admit she needed any). Still, it was nice to hear, and had the effect of transforming Russell
somewhat suddenly into possibly being a new and nice type. Possibly a normal type. Possibly the type she had prayed for. His
niceness very suddenly transformed him into being someone she might ever want to kiss; it became a desirable quality to her,
the niceness, and she felt that whether or not anything even took place with the nice possibly normal type, that she could
possibly like some other normal type. The following day she received news that her first film had been financed, which, recall,
she had also prayed for, and while Charlotte was not fully convinced that her prayers were directly related to these events,
seeing as how she did take the necessary action to put the career success in order (i.e., writing the script, sending out
the script, enduring many rejections of the script, rewriting the script, resubmitting the script, enduring several more rejections
of the script, considering financing the script with her own money, remembering she had no money, submitting the script again,
simultaneously fetching lots of coffee on lots of movie sets for lots of people until the financing finally came through),
it certainly encouraged her as far as any other prayers possibly coming true, it certainly caused her to consider praying
for the perfect coffee table and maybe also a little less post—El Niño snow, which seemed reasonable considering that it would
be harder for her to get out and do god’s work if she couldn’t get out at all, even though really, she was still never entirely
sure of what sort of work it was she was supposed to be doing for god, and overall, although the seeming results of the prayers
were pleasant, it still didn’t do much to pinpoint her understanding of god, which continued to be fuzzy. (Including: capitalize,
or no? What about the gender issue? Male? Female? Other? Why am I here? Are you in touch with my mom by any chance? Like this.)

At a Christmas party the following week, Charlotte was still having trouble gauging the level/nature of Russell’s interest
in her in terms of whether it was merely friendly or anything potentially more fun than merely friendly. She asked him questions
about his work (he had one of those jobs that defy any description Charlotte could wrap her mind around), and although she
was sincerely interested she also had her very good news to break and so she said,
Okay it’s time to talk about me now I have good news,
and she told him the news and he was appropriately impressed and appeared to be overall present and accounted for in the
conversation while obviously not suffering from any form of mania.

They had some lengthy and informative conversation about their families wherein it was uncovered that they had a few things
in common, enough for a potential understanding but not so much that it was freaky and therefore causing them to have that
premature intense soul-mate thing imperative in most of Charlotte’s past relationships, which never failed to burn out within
sixty to ninety days, which almost always resulted in vehement denial by one party or the other, but never both, that there
was ever an intense soul-mate thing going on in the first place. Russell had five actual and whole siblings all from the same
parents; Charlotte, as an only child, with a stepfamily that grew up in a different home, found this information to be almost
impossible to process.

You mean like the Brady Bunch?

Same number of kids, but you may recall they were steps.

Like the Nelsons?

A little less happy. More kids.