The Great Good Thing (14 page)

So just as my years at university were ending, I was coming to understand what an education was. To escape from the little island of the living. To know what thinking men and women have felt and seen and imagined through all the ages of the world. To meet my natural companions among the mighty dead. To walk with them in conversation. To know myself in them, through them. Because they are what we've become. Every blessing from soup bowls to salvation they discovered for us. Individuals just as real as you and me, they fought over each new idea and died to give life to the dreams we live in. Some of them—a lot of them—wasted their days following error down nowhere roads. Some hacked their way through jungles of suffering to collapse in view of some far-off golden city of the imagination. But all the thoughts we think—all the high towers of the mind's citadel—were sculpted out of shapeless nothing through the watches of their uncertain nights. Every good thing we know would be lost to darkness, all unremembered, if each had not been preserved for us by some sinner with a pen.

I wanted to read their works now, all of them, and so I began. After I graduated, after Ellen and I moved together to New York, I piled the books I had bought in college in a little forest of stacks around my tattered wing chair. And I read them. Slowly, because I read slowly, but every day, for hours, in great chunks.
I pledged to myself I would never again pretend to have read a book I hadn't or fake my way through a literary conversation or make learned reference on the page to something I didn't really know. I made reading part of my daily discipline, part of my workday, no matter what. Sometimes, when I had to put in long hours to earn a living, it was a rough slog. I still remember the years when I would wake up at 3:00 a.m. to go to a job writing radio news for the morning rush hour. I would come home from a seven-hour shift and play with my baby daughter. Then I would write fiction for four hours. Then, finally, I would read—my eyes streaming with tears of exhaustion—read until past midnight even if it meant I'd get only an hour or two of sleep before I woke up at three and went to work again.

The stacks around my wing chair dwindled and I built them up again and they dwindled again and I built them up.

It took me twenty years. In twenty years, I cleared those stacks of books away. I read every book I had bought in college, cover to cover. I read many of the other books by the authors of those books and many of the books those authors read and many of the books by the authors of those books too.

There came a day when I was in my early forties—I remember I was coming out of a pharmacy on the Old Brompton Road in London—when it occurred to me that I had done what I set out to do. I had taught myself the culture that had made me. I had taught myself the tradition I was in. In the matter of personal philosophy, I had finally earned the right to an opinion. I was no longer what I had been in my youth.

Against all odds, I had managed to get an education.

M
y last year in college, I owned an ancient jalopy, a maroon Dodge Dart. My friends and I christened it the Artful Dodge, after Oliver Twist's pickpocket pal the Artful Dodger. Because I had moved into San Francisco, I had to drive the Artful Dodge across the Bay Bridge to the Berkeley campus on the days when I had classes. A pal of mine who didn't own a car let me park the Dodge in his assigned space in the garage of his apartment building.

One day in early Autumn, I was walking back from campus to collect the car for the drive home. I looked up from my usual reverie and saw a woman hitchhiker standing across the street. She was slender and tall—as tall as I am—and as beautiful as a model on a magazine cover. To this day I remember the words that went through my head when I first saw her:
My God, would you look at that gorgeous Amazon!

She was gorgeous—and she was literally asking to be
picked up! Standing in the cross street by the parked cars with her thumb out, trying to flag a ride. I knew it wouldn't be long before some other guy saw her and swept her away. In fact, I was sure it was going to happen at any moment. And there I was, still half a block from where the Artful Dodge was parked.

I started running. I've always been fast on my feet and I reached the garage and my car in only a few seconds. I unlocked the Dodge, tossed my schoolbooks inside, and slid behind the wheel. The Artful was a good old car, it really was, but it never started on the first turn of the key, not ever. It was old. Most times when I tried to get it going, it wheezed; it coughed; it stuttered; it only started on the third or fourth try.

But this day of all days, the Dodge roared to life on the instant. I wrestled the transmission stick on the steering wheel and threw the car into reverse. The tires screamed on the concrete as I shot the car backward out of its space, spun it round right, and then fired it out of the garage like a bullet—a wobbly, rattling, dirty, maroon bullet.

The streets of Berkeley in that neighborhood were laid out in a one-way grid. The Gorgeous Amazon Hitchhiker was to my right but the road outside the garage ran leftward only. I would have to go all the way around the corner to get back to her—and so I did, rocketing insanely through a busy residential area at about fifty miles an hour. I wove in and out of traffic. I skirted pedestrians. I have one vivid memory of a gray-haired lady with a shopping bag dangling from her wrist, frozen in my windshield, her face agape with terror. I
somehow managed to swerve around her and go racing past. It's possible I screamed at her some words I shouldn't have.

But at last, I saw the hitchhiker up ahead with only one car between us. I could make out that the driver of that car was male, and while I didn't pray for him to go blind or die, I confess I did try to seize hold of his mind with my own and direct his thoughts away from any idea of stopping. To my astonishment, this appeared to work. The Gorgeous Amazon went on standing in the road with her thumb out and the guy in front of me drove right past her.

I pulled up alongside her. Trying to keep my voice steady and to dull what I knew must be the insane glaze of my rolling stare, I worked down my window and ever-so-casually asked if I might offer the lady a lift. I remember full well the sensation I had when she sat down in the front seat beside me. Nothing like a surge of passion. Nothing like a soundless symphony of invisible violins. It was instead almost exactly like what you feel when you are doing a jigsaw puzzle, when you have been searching for a piece without success for a long time, and suddenly you pick the right one from the pile and fit it to the picture with a whispered click.

“Sharp short,” she said to me. Meaning:
nice car.

“We call it the Artful Dodge,” I told her.

She thought I was married because I used the word
we.
I thought my whole life made a kind of sense it had never made before.

I drove her back to her place, a house in the hills where she rented a room. I went inside with her and we sat and talked for
more than three hours. I was so afraid she would see the way I felt about her—how gone I was—that I lost my nerve and couldn't bring myself to ask for her phone number.
I'll always be able to find her house again
, I told myself as I drove home. But in the days that followed, I found it wasn't so. Her house was hidden among the mazes of winding lanes up there.
Well,
I thought, after searching for it fruitlessly,
I'll go back to the place where she hitchhiked and find her there.
But her car, broken that first day, had been repaired soon after. She wasn't hitchhiking anymore.

Every day then, at the same hour each day, I would drive by the spot where I had first seen her, but she was never there. Even on days when I had no classes, I would travel across the bay to look for her. By then, I had begun to realize in some callow way what had happened to me, what a stroke of luck, or gift of providence it was. I knew I would find the Amazon again eventually, because I knew I had to.

After a few weeks of searching, though, I began to grow desperate. I considered phoning her father. She had mentioned he was the chairman of the English department, whatever that meant. I looked him up in the school directory and, yes, there he was. It was a daunting thought—to call up a professor and ask him to help me find his daughter for libidinal purposes—but I was ready to do it.

Fortunately, before it came to that, I managed to stumble on the girl herself. I was on one of my passes by her old hitchhiking place when I spotted her walking to her car, which was parked nearby. I pulled up beside her and asked her out. Within weeks
we were living together in an apartment in San Francisco. Four years later we were married. We're married still.

My marriage to Ellen has not been an ordinary one, not by a long shot. It has been a lifelong romance. I love her, by which I mean her good is my good and her misfortune mine, and I love her passionately, by which I mean I hunger for her company as well as her touch. This has not changed even a little in our nearly forty years together. In nearly forty years, we have had exactly one quarrel. It was a meaningless flair of temper more than thirty years ago. Our apartment was being painted. Everything was in chaos. I had a night job and hadn't slept in weeks. We were both out of sorts, and we snapped at each other. It quickly passed. For the rest, we have been poor and rich together, crazy and sane, happy and miserable, but never wholly out of harmony. I find I can no longer even dream a woman who is not in some sense she.

But more than that. Our marriage has taken on a life of its own. It has become a third creation, greater than anything we are individually or together. I like to think we're perfectly decent people, Ellen and I, but I have all the usual flaws of men and she of women. We're clearly neither one of us as special as this vessel that contains us. Our marriage shines around us and between us with an otherly light, a sacred habitation for our shambolic humanity. It is soul stuff made visible.

Living within such a spiritual sanctuary has an effect on you over the years. Just knowing such a marriage can exist refashions the way you look at life. For me, it put limits on what I could call illusory or meaningless. Other men could believe that subjective experience is by nature relative and
unreliable. Other men could reason from suffering to nihilism. Not me. Our marriage gave undeniable substance to the inner experience of true love, and true love in turn shone a light on the redemptive possibilities even of tragedy. Even the kingdom of evil came to seem to me like only the empty space where true love might have been. And when, over time, I had reasoned my way to God, it was our marriage, in part, that made me trust my reasoning. I trusted myself because I had recognized love when I saw it, and it was the fact of our long love that had slowly revealed to me a greater love than ours, the love that was our love's source and inspiration. It was as if our marriage had guided me through my days from a realm beyond the ordinary, the way a lodestar shines from deepest space yet nonetheless leads you home.

All this would only dawn on me and shape me over the course of decades. At the start, our relationship was mostly what these things are: sex and giddiness and setting up house. I met Ellen at a good time in my life, even a jolly time, relatively speaking. The depression and anger that had marked my first year at school had receded. Bumming around the country and working at the radio station had fed a little of that hunger for Experience that bedeviled me so much. I was glad to be back at school and, if I was still more or less vamping my way through higher education, I was also beginning to discover what I needed and wanted to learn. I was living in San Francisco, a lovely city. I was dating several girls whom I liked. Things were going all right for me. Finding Ellen just seemed like the natural next step in a good life.

But I think I already knew that the good life wouldn't continue. I think I already knew, deep down, that something was wrong with me. That depression I'd experienced my first months at school: now that I'd gotten some distance from it, I could look back and see it had been a really bad business. The long sleeps and the heavy drinking, the endless fevers and sunken-eyed solitude. Once you have felt that tide of darkness rising in you, you always know it might rise again.

It did rise from time to time, not full-blown depression maybe, but sorrow for no reason; anger for no reason; ugly, tormenting thoughts and a mood of persistent, unshakable melancholy. I called it the Bola—after that string with a weight on each end that some South American Indians used to use for a throwing weapon—because it seemed to come out of nowhere and wrap itself around my throat, growing tighter and tighter until I felt it would strangle me. Sometimes I thought it was connected to the writing process. The Bola would often hit me as I was finishing a book and I would wonder if my subconscious was punishing me for succeeding at something when I knew my father wanted me to fail. Other times, though, it seemed to just be there, inside me, less like a bola, really, than like an ensnaring interior spider web, interwoven strands of rage and sorrow and twisted sexual fantasies and imaginary arguments with my parents that would replay in my brain obsessively.

When I graduated college, Ellen and I moved to Manhattan. We found an apartment on the west side, a tiny place but in a nice neighborhood and renting cheap. My parents gave me a
little money to start my life with, enough so I didn't have to get a job right away. Ellen continued college at Barnard. I began to try to sell the last novel I'd written and to write a new one. In both enterprises, I was hampered by the fact that I had no idea what I was doing, and no one who could explain it to me.

I had no mentor. I had never had a mentor, only an anti-mentor in my father. I had had no one—no one I trusted—to teach me even the simplest things about starting out in life, or beginning a career. I did not know there was such a thing as a career. I did not know that you could expect to move through it in stages, to learn from your failures and build upon your successes. I did not know that you could seek advice and help from older people. In fact, my father had left me so leery of authority, I wouldn't have dreamed of consulting my elders about anything. To me, they all seemed like bitter and crafty competitors out to trip me up.

I did not even know about the virtues of hard work. This seems almost unbelievable to me now, but it's true. My father had taught me that talent was like a delicate mechanism that would break or wear out from overuse. I was a hard worker by nature. I worked hard when I was working certainly; I crafted every sentence with care and went over it and over it. But I did not know that you could wake up earlier and accomplish more; that you could work weekends if you had to; that you could strive to achieve not just excellence but also prosperity and that the two need not be in conflict. I didn't know anything about anything really and I did not have anyone who could teach me.

The new novel I began to work on was called
Face of the Earth.
It was, if I say so myself, an excellent idea for a story. Inspired by my wanderings around the country, it concerned two young drifters, a wan intellectual type and a brash braggart. The braggart spins a yarn that may or may not be true about his pursuit of a woman who may or may not exist. In trying to get at the truth of the story, the intellectual not only falls in love with the woman in the braggart's story but begins to suspect that the braggart murdered her. It was a good plot. It was meant to deal with my thoughts on storytelling, with the difficulty of distinguishing reality from narrative, and with the way sexual desire sweeps us into the greater life and death of nature. It suffered from lyrical writing and a lot of youthful mythological symbolism—and from the fact that I still often worked late at night into early morning. It's a terrible time to write. Every awful word you put down seems like a masterstroke. Still, all that said, the book was a leap for me, the best thing I'd written up to that point.

As for selling my previously completed novel, the last book I'd written while in college . . . well, I knew I needed an agent but I didn't have the first clue how to find one. Instead of writing polite query letters the way you're supposed to, I went around the city barging unannounced into agents' offices with my boxed manuscript under my arm. I would explain how talented I was to whomever would listen, then demand that the agent read my work. Receptionists gaped at me in comical shock. Some of the top agents in New York actually came out of their offices to see me out of pure curiosity. One
guy took me by the elbow and virtually hurled me out into the hall, shouting after me, “This isn't how it's done!” In spite of him, I actually did find an agent this way eventually, but she couldn't sell the book anywhere.