Providence (12 page)

The appearance of the Flower Children in the mid-sixties bowled me over. Not because they were dirty, not because they preferred dressing in rags, not because they let their hair grow, but because they’d stopped thinking about the bomb. I hadn’t dreamed it was possible to do that. For us, the bomb was new and everlastingly urgent. For them, it was old and boring. For us, the answer was a house in the suburbs and a secure future. For them, the answer was fun and dope and music and sex and love. For them, the answer was to live now instead of waiting till your pension kicked in.

They said, “You can’t trust anyone over thirty,” and I said, “Hold on, I may be over thirty—by a hair!—but you can trust
me.”
I knew they were onto something, you see. My generation’s desperate clutching onto what is safe and solid and material was a sickness. The Flower Children were right to reject the values and goals we’d grown up with. I saw all this, so I took exception to their rule about being over thirty. I was a few years away from seeing it, but they were right and I was wrong—even in my own case.

The sexual revolution doomed my second marriage, which might well have dragged on for years otherwise. It was failing for much the same reasons as the first. My shallow self-esteem couldn’t survive my failure to achieve perfection. Mary wasn’t prepared to demand as much from life as Katherine, so she was willing to put up with this. The trouble was, I wasn’t. I was now no longer ready
to settle down to a placid, secure life. I wanted much, much more. Suddenly I wanted adventure, I wanted romance—I wanted in on that revolution! Although I’d lived as a bachelor for a couple of years between marriages, I really hadn’t done much living. Now I meant to cut loose, now I meant to sow wild oats by the truck-load!

Well, I was a pathetic creature. I had no more idea what life in the real world was all about than a three-year-old does. I’d listened to the lessons of my old tutor, Michael Carden, and hadn’t understood a word of them.

Have you ever seen Arte Johnson’s Dirty Old Man on
Laugh-In?
It’s a brilliant characterization. But the odd thing is, his Dirty Old Man isn’t really a dirty old man at all, because he’s totally honest about his intentions, totally honest with himself and totally honest with the women he encounters. At age thirty-five,
I
was a dirty old man, because I was a liar. I lied to myself and I lied to every woman I met—not intentionally or consciously, mind you. It was simply my impression that there was no way to establish a relationship with any woman except through deception. It was my estimate that any woman would reject me if I allowed her to see me as I really was.

I wanted women to believe I was a liberated man (and I thought I was), when in fact I was merely a would-be libertine, which liberated women picked up on in about three seconds. I thought there was just some little trick I needed to learn; I thought maybe my technique needed a little work. I deceived myself in these ways for as long as I could manage it, a year or so, then I gradually began to be
persuaded that there was a much deeper point that I was missing, and that I needed some help in finding it. After fifteen years and two failed marriages, I was finally ready for psychotherapy.

I was tremendously lucky to find a wonderful therapist, Dr. Ada Saichy, a Jew who managed to get out of Europe just ahead of the Final Solution. Although she’d practiced for years in Czechoslovakia, her home, she’d had to go back to school for a new doctoral degree here (though of course that was long ago). Her orientation, like Dr. Zirpoli’s, was fundamentally Freudian, but her method was eclectic rather than strictly psychoanalytic.

Everything I told you about my childhood was shaped by what I learned during the two years I worked with Madame Saichy. I certainly didn’t come to her with the understanding that I had a compulsive need to be perfect, based on the mistaken notion that being perfect would make me lovable. These were things we worked out during the course of long months of effort. I gradually came to understand that perfection was my substitute for adequacy: If I was perfect, no one would notice how worthless I was.

And how did I come to think of myself as worthless? That was easily answered, though the answer seemed to do me no good. My parents had convinced me I was worthless—in a thousand ways that I won’t bore you with
—but knowing this fact didn’t help, because as far as I could see they were absolutely right. Stripped of my perfection, what was I good for? Not a damned thing, as far as I could see. Oh, I was a hell of a writer and editor, and a pretty good boss, but who cares about things like that? As a
person,
I was a washout. My entire strategy with people I met (especially women, of course) was to trick them into thinking I was someone worth knowing—someone perhaps even worth loving. Every word, every gesture, had to be calculated to this end. Everything I did was a lie, because the truth was that I was utterly hollow. This was what had to be hidden, my devastating secret. In this undertaking, spontaneity was obviously the greatest enemy. To be spontaneous would be to reveal the great yawning emptiness inside of me.

When I reached this point of understanding, after perhaps a year, Madame Saichy said to me, “You know, there really isn’t very much wrong with you,” and I laughed, having at last figured out just how
much
was wrong with me. But she persisted. “There will come a day,” she said, “when you’ll be flooded with self-esteem. It won’t happen in an hour or a day or a week, but the time will come when you’ll be able to look at yourself and recognize your own worth without a shadow of a doubt.”

I shook my head, knowing that this hopeless prediction was meant to encourage me but unable to give it the least credit. She might as well have said that I would one day find a magic lantern with three wishes in it. She knew of course that I was incapable of taking her word for this—or of even understanding what she was talking about.
Nevertheless, as things turned out, it happened just the way she predicted, except for one detail: It
did
happen in an hour.

I suppose it must have been half a year later. I was profoundly stuck and profoundly discouraged. Nothing had happened in months. I understood how I’d gotten this way, but so what? My parents’ estimate of me was that I was about as wonderful as a wart, and all I could see was that they were right. I said to Madame Saichy, “For God’s sake, if you see something of value in me, tell me what it is!”

“That I cannot do—must not do,” she replied (of course). “What
I
see doesn’t matter. Only what
you
see matters. It is
you
who must esteem yourself, not me. Without self-esteem, the esteem of others is worthless.”

I left her office at an all-time low. In fact, I was so desperate that I was willing to try something completely silly. Bussing down Sheridan Road on my way to work, I took out a scrap of paper, a bank deposit receipt or something, and headed it with these words:
Things that are good about me.
I was sure that, having taken this brave but foolhardy step, I wasn’t going to be able to think of a single thing to write, but, by golly, suddenly words were pouring out of my pen:
I’m reasonably trustworthy, I can keep a secret, I’m never deliberately cruel, I honor my promises, I’m fair, I can see things from other people’s point of view, I can own up to my mistakes,
and so on. I can’t remember all I wrote. A lot of it was nonsense anyway, but that didn’t matter. The clouds parted and rushed off
toward the horizon the way they do in stop-motion photography. The light flooded in, and it all came clear. I was transformed—not in an hour, in a single minute. It was literally all over. Just as Madame Saichy had said, I was flooded with self-esteem, and it was never going to go away.

It wasn’t that I’d found a collection of virtues that made me lovable. In the course of writing out my list, I’d stumbled on the key insight: What makes people lovable isn’t being perfect, it’s simply being
human
and, reading that list, I saw that that’s what I was. I was
within the range.
Just as Madame Saichy had said,
there wasn’t much wrong with me.
I wasn’t a saint (which is what I’d hoped to be when I was trying to be perfect), but I also wasn’t a monster (which is how I’d come to view myself in the past two years). I was
human.
I was
ordinary.
I was like
other
people, and if other people are worthy of love, then so was I! Why on earth
shouldn’t
people love me?

And I suddenly saw that, just as I was like other people, other people were like
me.
Even
women
were like me, because they too were human. I was waiting for them to love me—and, being just like me, they were also waiting for me to love them. They
wanted
my love! And why the hell not?

By the time I reached my office, I was literally a changed man. I was a foot taller. I was ready to embrace everyone in my path. At last I understood the obvious truth. No one wanted me to be perfect. Everyone wanted me to be like them—and I was. I was
one of them.
At the
age of thirty-seven, I had at last joined the human race. I no longer had to guard against spontaneity. People
wanted
me to be spontaneous. Nobody cared if I made mistakes. Nobody was watching to
see
if I made mistakes. I was free of all that.

The needy are insatiable. I know that because I was once one of them. I was like hundreds of millions of men in our culture. The hollowness inside of me was so vast that the love of one woman was not nearly enough to fill it. Who’s the basketball player who boasts of having had ten thousand women? Men typically regard this as a tremendous, enviable success. They wish
they
could have ten thousand women—a million women! This isn’t a measure of their virility (as they like to imagine); it’s a measure of their incalculable neediness.

Now, for the first time in my life, I had left the ranks of the needy. I was no longer insatiable. I no longer needed every woman in the world. One would be enough. I no longer had to make a try for every single woman who crossed my path. This meant that genuine friendship with women was possible. From that point on, I no longer had to
pretend
to be liberated. From the moment we met, women knew I was following no hidden agenda with regard to them.
They knew I wasn’t just feeding them a line, wasn’t scheming for a way to get something from them they weren’t prepared to give.

This book that I’m talking here tonight with you—you didn’t know it was a book, but it is—this book, I’ve decided, will be called
Providence.
…

How do I define
Providence?
I’ll answer that the way a mathematician will answer you if you ask for a definition of the word
set.
In mathematics
set
is an undefined term. Unless you’re a mathematician (or are used to dealing with mathematicians), you will demand to know how on earth you can have a study or a theory that is based on an undefined term, but this will get you nowhere. In this book
Providence
is an undefined term. This is a book
about
Providence, a book in which one can
learn
about Providence, without ever having it defined. Every time you hear me say, “It was my good fortune at this point that …” or “As luck would have it …” or “If this thing had happened just one week earlier …” or words to that effect, you’ll know I’m talking about Providence. I may have given you the impression that this book is about me or about the origins of
Ishmael,
but in fact it’s about Providence … whatever that may be.

Now …

A week after this great transformative epiphany was the occasion of our annual Christmas party at Fuller & Dees Publishing, where I was the executive editor, second
in command. This wasn’t your ordinary Christmas party, an office party with Christmas decorations. Our way of doing business was to have a small core staff and an army of freelancers: writers, designers, editors, illustrators, and so on, and this party was for all of them, along with another small army of printing salesmen, paper salesmen, typesetters, and so on. This was quite a bash.

One of the women at the party was a freelance writer who was working on a project of mine. I have the impression that I’d talked to her for an hour total in the course of our business. She evidently liked to keep this sort of contact at a minimum, because when an assignment was due, I’d find it shoved under the door when I arrived in the morning. I had my eye on her this night. I watched with great amusement as one of the printing salesmen started putting the moves on her. Having been there myself, I knew exactly what was going through his mind. I actually saw him slip his wedding ring off and pocket it. When he picked up the telephone, I moved close enough to hear him call his wife and explain that he might be a little later than he thought.

I watched him romancing her with glum calculation, waiting for his moment, waiting, waiting, waiting till the time would be just right for him to say, “Hey, would you like to have dinner with me?”

It was expected of me that I’d stick around at least until the party peaked and began to run downhill. When it finally did, I went over to where this writer and printing salesman were standing and said to her, “Hi. Would you like to go get a hamburger?”

Both of them looked a little stunned, but she quickly said, “Sure,” and went to get her coat.

The printing salesman’s eyes were bugging out as he goggled at me in bafflement. Finally he said—believe it or not—“Can I come too?”

I said, with elegant simplicity: “No.”