In Spite of Everything (28 page)

A détente ensued. The eruption, though furious, was weirdly purifying. Cal and I both seemed to sense that in it we had come up against something hard and real. In the final analysis, the truth was that neither had Cal been revolving around me nor I around him. We were both solitary entities revolving around a star that was finally dying.

I
n the immediate aftershock following a bomb going off, everything goes flat, noiseless, vacant. This sounds dramatic. It didn’t feel that way. It just felt like what reality actually is. It had been here, undergirding everything, all along. There was a vibratory quality to it. If “Om” is the rich, living sound of the universe, the sound of this place was its polar opposite. If there can be such a thing, it was the vibration of nothing at all. This was not unfamiliar terrain for me. I lived there for many years after my own parents’ divorce. I lived there for much of the year following our separation. But after the flat, white-noise period, cracks appeared, as if the land was just now responding to the blast.

About three months into the separation, an abyss began to open
up in front of me. I didn’t see it coming. But I felt it, and the wider I felt it opening, the more I became convinced that in fact it had always been there, it was all around me, and it was never going to close. Let me be clear that this is not a metaphor. The pitch and depth of this void—I felt it, palpably, all the time. After it had been with me for about a month, unabating, I started to think that maybe the seismic impact set off by my marital rupture had blown open the door to some higher reality for me. You hear of people who say that following an operation, accident, or some other major trauma, they were instantaneously endowed with the sense datum of collective purpose, universal light. In my case, the blunt force of trauma had blasted open this abyss. It was
my
ultimate reality.

I didn’t know what to do. In spite of my other nasty experiences earlier in life, I had no experience with this. I was aware that I was losing it. But I was already doing everything that everybody tells you to do. I was already in therapy. I was already on antidepressants. I was already doing yoga. I was already eating right. Still, it was there. When I was alone, it was just the void. When I ventured out into the world or was with other people, however, it took on an almost malevolent quality. It was like being a character in a Stephen King short story. Your workaday life is mundane; you look okay to people. It’s simply that wherever you go, an invisible grotesque presence is three steps behind you. There is no question of shaking it. Sometimes it speeds closer, its breath at your cheek; other times it lags. It has been there all along; you just see it now. The question was not how I could make it go away, but rather whether it was worth it to walk with it at all.

One crystalline day in February, I sat in my car underneath the Brooklyn Bridge. I got out. I looked up. For a while. I got back in. My babies.

The only time I felt okay was when I was with them, transported back to the world in which I was the mom with her schmushkies. I was able to make dinner, sing loudly, and dance, which are normal
mom things to my children. But the way Cal and I had decided to arrange things—trying out joint custody—I was without my children half the time.

Because I didn’t know what else to do, I met with the minister of the church I attended intermittently. Since Zanny’s birth, I had come to a relatively comfortable meeting place with God, especially in my conversations with my children. It was always cast in the rubric of love. When we were mad and struck out, we had a talk about how we were ignoring God for the moment. But we could always go back, and when we did, we felt better because then our hearts were restored to normal. When we talked about life after death, we said that there is nothing to be afraid of. Our bodies were our bodies, and they were good and useful while we were alive, but the bigger deal is that we had always been together, and we always would be. And these things felt real and authentic because I just knew, in my gut, that it was the truth. Especially after my dad died.

Now, however, I wasn’t sure about anything I had thought before. Sitting in the minister’s living room, I told him, frankly, that I didn’t know what else to do but pray for help and that I wasn’t sure how to do that. He sat quietly for a moment and then prescribed to me
lectio divina
, Latin for “holy reading.” He explained that this form of prayer dated back to the twelfth century and was intended to be a feasting on the Word (making it, he said, a particularly fitting form of prayer for writers and talky people in general). It is composed of four sequential parts, he said:
lectio
, in which one reads a scriptural passage slowly and attentively, not so much for comprehension as for grace and beauty;
meditatio
, in which the Holy Spirit working within you will illuminate—actually light up—a particular phrase in the scripture;
oratio
, in which one lets this phrase roll over and repeat itself internally, and in so doing, enters into intuitive conversation with God; and finally
contemplatio
, simple, loving comfort in God—joyful rest. He instructed me to start with the Psalms, to open to any page and just begin.
Make sure you set aside
at least an hour to do this
, he said,
and try to do it at the same time each day
.

Oh
, I thought. I didn’t really know what I had been expecting from my visit. But as I left the parsonage, the black weight pulled down on me with new force. I think I had almost hoped he would do something magical, like a laying on of hands: to touch my forehead and relieve me with some kind of surprising, special blessing. There hadn’t been any miracle. Ridiculous.

I waved politely to the minister and pulled the door closed behind me. It was a clear late February afternoon. The streets were bright, antiseptic—a study in physics, light refracting off every plane. As my eyes adjusted, I felt it materialize: The demon I’d deposited at the threshold was exactly where I’d left it.

I was not looking forward to night.

B
ut night came. I read my children several books and lay down with them until they fell asleep, as I always did. Although I often ended up falling asleep with them and would have been happy to do that on this night, I was wide awake. There was nothing for me to do but go into my room and sit on my bed, eyes open. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do anything but that, and I didn’t want to do that. But lying between my kids with this black
thing
clinging to my chest felt wrong, as though I was letting a monster into their room. So I got up.

I sat on the bed in my room. When we were renovating the house, we had decided that our bedroom would be painted a meditative blue, with nothing hanging on the walls to busy it. Now, contemplative quietude was cold space. My gaze drifted over to the stacks of books, which I hadn’t bothered to organize, lined up against the baseboards. I didn’t want to read any of them. They were mostly giveaways that my mother had just cleared out from her own house to make room for a move to a condo—outdated feminist literary criticism, the lesser works of John Dos Passos and Upton Sinclair,
coffee table books on Modern chair design and the plight of Venice. There were two cards posted on my mirror. One was from my agent and friend, Tina. It had arrived paper-clipped to a check for a thousand dollars and a note: “Don’t say anything—just cash it.” I ripped up the check and taped up the note. Another was a homemade Valentine from my friend Heather. She had drawn a heart and written in the middle of it: “You are here.”

But as I was looking away, my eye landed on the giant Bible, with its gilded pages and medieval art, that Pru had given me for Christmas that year. She had been very excited, and proud of her present. She had chosen it for me because, she said, “You like God, Mama.” When I’d said I guessed that was true but wondered what in particular had made her think so, she explained, “You like church, and I don’t really, but I also just know that you like God.” Bunny rabbit. It is hackneyed to say that your children pick up more on what you do than on what you say you do, but it is nonetheless true. I guess I had inserted the whole idea of God into my children’s lives a lot more than maybe I’d realized. That made me glad. Yet there was my baby’s Holy Bible, and there I was on the bed thinking about what she, with her little mammal face, had said to me. And I was thinking that I had pushed the whole God thing precipitously. Or maybe not precipitously, just stupidly, desperately. I had made it up to make myself and my children feel better. Of course, I loved my children. I loved my children. And in some ways, I could muster up the idea that there was something Greater for them. But I could not muster it up for myself. It wasn’t real. This void was real. It had always been real. My heart wasn’t ice. It was dust.

I sat there for a long time.

At some point, I just opened it up. I don’t know what hour of night or early morning it was; it was very dark out. I didn’t decide
I am going to do this now
, nor did I feel some force compelling me to open it—nothing like that. It’s just that one moment I was not doing something, and the next I was. I happened to flip to Psalm 60.

I did begin to feel something, reading this.

Reading on was too much. What had been black and static now roiled. I could not read it.

But then I got to it. It didn’t light up on the page, as the prescription of
lectio divina
had described that it might. I can’t explain it except to say that I came through something and got to it.

I lifted my head. I closed the book. I sat.

After a long time, I realized that I was not just sitting anymore. I felt light.

O
ne of the outcomes of practicing
lectio divina
is that it compelled me to read the Bible regularly. Frankly, I’d never really gotten much out of the Bible. Everyone says how wonderful its language is, how powerful its imagery is, how central a knowledge of it is to a basic understanding of Western literature and philosophy. The latter is incontestable, but as for the rest, I don’t know—not so much, for me anyway. It’s not that I didn’t like the people in it. I love Moses and Jacob: all their conflicts, tantrums, and doubts. And Jesus, to me, is the very definition of hard-core punk. Indeed, my first tattoo, at age nineteen, was a Jesus fish because my friend Nate and I had decided that—as the primitive password of the early, persecuted Christians—
it was
the
most powerful symbol of rebellion of all time. But the Bible itself? It’s not at all smart, sensitive, or educated of me, but I always found the language arcane and autocratic, the imagery obvious. I read the Bible so that I could read Donne, Dante, Spenser, and Shakespeare, but I used it primarily as a reference book. I once even got a bit of a thrashing from an assistant philosophy professor at Columbia when I was sophomorically critiquing something about symbolism in the Bible’s literary style in a paper. He actually called me into his office and put it to me point-blank: “Do you not appreciate that for millions of people, the Bible is a sacred text?” I realized later that he was basically telling me not to be such an asshole—that for most of the people who read it, it isn’t symbolic—but at the time, I was shocked.
Is he crazy?
I remember thinking.
God, how’d a rube like that get a gig teaching here?

Coming to the Bible with nothing left was different. I have heard people talk about the “gift of desperation,” which sounds to me like junky New Age self-help twaddle (as does any phrase invoking “gift”). While I still bristle at it, I now understand this expression. Moreover, it was precisely the desperation in the biblical voices of David, Solomon, Jeremiah, Job that helped. It isn’t the vernacular of contemporary depression and angst, does not evoke a vocabulary that includes “good boundaries,” “owning” this or that feeling, or “taking care of” oneself. It is the language of flat-out despair. It is that of Lear on the heath, of Macduff after he learns that Macbeth’s henchmen have slaughtered his wife and all his children: “All my pretty ones? / Did you say all? O hell-kite! All? / What, all my pretty chickens and their dam / At one fell swoop?”
^*
This is the kind of language that I understood.

I understood the imagery of physical mortification. To someone in despair, this imagery is not symbolic; it is the thing itself. Before my father died, I had not understood this. Being with him in his last twelve hours of life, watching him actually die, holding his cold, swollen hand, changed that. It is a luxury of inexperience to think in metaphors; death is death is death. What’s more, I had always been very proud of my “tough as nails” status; I could power through anything, and often had. But my physical response in the days and weeks after my father’s death cut me off at the knees. A cold became a three-month case of pneumonia. I just couldn’t get better. I sustained permanent lung damage. I’d never been sick like that, ever; now I carry around an inhaler.