The Great Good Thing (17 page)

I put out my cigarette. I got out of my chair. I turned off the radio. I left the bedroom. I never considered suicide again.

From the very first day I started it, therapy had changed the rules of life for me. Up until then, I considered some of my most self-destructive and disturbing habits of mind to be inborn aspects of my nature. If I was unhappy, I thought it was just the way things were, the world being what it was, and me being who I was. Like a lot of artists, too, I assumed my suffering and whatever talent I had were inseparable. I was afraid that if I lost one, I would also sacrifice the other.

But as soon as my therapy began, I realized, no, none of this was true. My misery was not me and it was not the world and it was not connected to my talent, such as it was. It was just a wound I had sustained in the course of living, a wound that could be healed. It was a broken piece of the psychic machinery, and it could be fixed.

I've often wondered what that initial meeting was like for the psychiatrist because for me now it seems poignantly comical. Frantic with hypochondria, pale with depression, edgy with anger, I all but stumbled into his office that day. It was a cramped, windowless room on the ground floor of an ornate apartment building on Manhattan's west side. I dropped into the armchair and he sat in a high-backed swivel chair a few feet away from me. There was a Freudian couch against the wall to my right, a desk to my left, and hardly any space for anything else.

The psychiatrist was a slumped, sad-eyed Jewish man about ten or fifteen years older than me. He had a thin, quiet voice and spoke deliberately as if to make sure every word he chose was just the right one. He had a dry sense of humor, too, and I could tell right away he was smart, which mattered to me very much at the time. How could I expect a mere mortal to heal me if he couldn't comprehend my towering genius?

He asked how he could help me. In answer, I began talking and talking and talking some more. Over the next forty-five minutes or so, I believe I told him every single untoward, sad, and twisted thing I knew about myself. Bizarre sexual fantasies, homicidal hostilities, deviant desires, and antisocial
behaviors, all of it. I had been thinking it over for years, you see. Probing my troubles, investigating their psychic causes. I knew the theories of Freud well, and I knew myself pretty well. Now everything I knew and thought I knew came pouring out of me in a torrent of words. I told all my darkest secrets in that first session with so much
brio
and abandon that the psychiatrist finally shifted in his seat and shook his head in puzzlement and said in his deliberate way, “Why are you telling me this?”

To which I replied, startled, “I thought you might need to know!”

When the fifty-minute hour ended, I left the little room. I left the ornate apartment building. Made my way back to work on the east side. I walked across Central Park. It was clean and green in the early autumn sunlight. I felt relieved to have that first session over with. I even felt slightly hopeful about the future. Other than that, though, I felt no different than I had before. I had told this doctor things on first meeting him—many things—that I had never told anyone ever. You would have thought making such a complete confession would have had some profound emotional effect on me. It didn't seem to. The world and I seemed about the same as ever. I shrugged to myself and continued on my way.

The next day at home—we still lived in the Westchester cottage then—I had to make a phone call to arrange an appointment. The phone was on a shelf off the narrow stairway that connected the ground-floor kitchen with the living room on the second floor. I sat on the stairs as I made my
call. I remember I got into some minor squabble with a nasty receptionist and ended up slamming the handset down into its cradle with frustration.

Then, without any warning, I buried my face in my hands and began to weep.

I had not cried for years and years and I had not sobbed like this since childhood. My chest throbbed painfully with the force of the convulsions. My whole body shook and it went on and on. I understood. It was a delayed reaction to my first therapy session. I had shoveled three decades of muck out of my consciousness. Now my body was washing the vessel clean. I relaxed and let the process run its course.

The effect of the catharsis was remarkable. When it was over, it seemed as if every symptom of mental sickness had vanished from me for good and all. The anger, the depression, the hypochondria—as if by magic, they were all gone. For days and days afterward, I felt a radiance of light and life rising inside me, a kind of inner dawn. I felt at once still and hilarious, and I knew this was my True and Original Self reborn. My interior cosmos wheeled in harmony with the stars, and the little birds of happiness sang tweet, tweet, tweet . . . and yes, all right, I knew it was temporary. I didn't think I'd been cured of my lifelong mental affliction in one fifty-minute session. I knew all the old agonies would soon come clamoring back to their home in my brain.

Still, while it lasted, it was a glorious sensation. More than that. I believed that these few days of high peace gave me a momentary glimpse of something true. This, I thought, was
who I really was, not that other miserable man I had been living with all these years. This inner harmony was the goal toward which I would be working in my therapy. And it was real. It existed. I was experiencing it right now, like a vision of things to come. There was a long trek of self-understanding ahead of me, I knew. But for those few days, I was allowed to visit the promised land on the other side.

For years, maybe most of my life, I had languished in that typical young intellectual's delusion that gloom and despair are the romantic lot of the brilliant and the wise. But now I saw: it wasn't so. Why should it be? What sort of wisdom has no joy in it? What good is wisdom without joy? By joy I don't mean ceaseless happiness, of course. I don't mean willed stupidity for the sake of a cheap smile. The world is sad and it is suffering. A tragic sense is essential to both realism and compassion. By joy I mean a vital love of life in both sorrow and gladness. Why not? The hungry can't eat your tears. The poor can't spend them. They're no comfort to the afflicted and they don't bring the wicked to justice. Everything useful that can be done in the world can be done in joy.

For the first time in what seemed forever, I began to believe that I might make my way back to the man I was meant to be.

The next shock of revelation came only four months later. This one was the most spectacular: the one truly mystical experience I have ever had in my life.

It was December now. My wife had entered the final days of her pregnancy. This was during the first popularity of so-called “natural childbirth,” in which the woman used no painkilling drugs or procedures but endured labor with only breathing techniques and massages to alleviate her suffering. Our obstetrician, a squat, gruff, no-nonsense Italian American woman, responded to the fad sarcastically. “Since when did nature become our friend?” she asked. It was a good question. But we were caught up in the fashion and devoted to the idea.

The truth was, the most positive aspect of “natural childbirth” was probably the least “natural,” the least primitive; a genuine innovation. In “natural childbirth,” husbands relinquished their traditional role of pacing and chain-smoking cigarettes in the hospital hallway during the labor. Adam had probably done something like this during the birth of Cain and Abel, but no more. Instead, in “natural childbirth,” the father served as a “birth coach,” attending his wife in the delivery room. This enabled him to lend her some moral support for what that was worth. But more important—or at least more dramatic—was the fact, it allowed him to witness the birth of his child.

Ellen and I dutifully attended a seemingly endless series of classes during which we practiced the natural childbirth breathing and massage techniques. Even a mere male like myself could see these would be more or less useless against the agonies of labor, but I showed up and did my part. It was during these classes that I noticed I had a powerful emotional
reaction to the instructional films that showed real births. The precise instant when the baby slid from its mother into the world always affected me deeply. Every time I saw it, I found it poignant and awesome.

Our teachers instructed us to make a pregnancy kit, a small gym bag full of the tools the birth coach would use to help his wife through her travail. I don't remember now what this seemingly random collection of objects was (it included tennis balls for some reason) but the bag developed a totemic significance for us. It became an emblem of the comforts of the “natural” approach. On the night my wife went into labor, I calmly escorted her down the narrow cottage steps and picked up the pregnancy bag waiting by the kitchen door. We walked out into the driveway where I calmly rested the bag on the car's roof and helped my wife into the passenger seat. I then calmly went around to the driver's side, slid in behind the wheel, and calmly drove away, calmly forgetting the bag so that it tumbled from the car roof to the gravel, not to be seen again until our return home some days later.

We reached the hospital in the city and checked in. There followed thirteen hours of brutal labor with no drugs, no spinal blocks, and not even any tennis balls. My wife is the gentlest and most feminine of women, but she has, I swear, a core of iron. Nothing but my absolute insistence would have deterred her from seeing this through to the finish drug free. And while even at twenty-eight I liked to think of myself as a patriarchal tyrant, I tended to limit my absolute insistence to calling for a cocktail before dinner. In more important
matters, I trusted Ellen's judgment and wanted only her happiness.

So, through the night and on into a snowy morning, she was tortured on the rack of her contractions. The only comic relief came from a pretty little blond nurse who took a liking to me—I was a handsome devil then!—and kept running into the room to rub my shoulders in order to help me bear my wife's pain. Ellen's reaction to this was unprintable in a book about religion but, trust me, it was hilarious.

Sometime during the last hours of the labor, Ellen discharged some meconium—fetal stool. In our classes, we had been taught that this was a sign the baby might be in some sort of trouble. “Fetal distress” was the nice phrase for it. My wife's eyes were already glazed with pain and exhaustion, but now I saw the hot-white light of panic come into them. We pressed the alarm button by the bed to call for help. A new nurse hurried in, a serious-looking brunette in her late twenties, as I was. It was strange, but the moment she walked through the door I straightened and she stopped in her tracks and we realized that we knew each other. Ellen and I told her about the meconium. The nurse took one look at Ellen and saw her up-spiraling terror. She sat on the bed and held my wife by the shoulders, peered deep into her eyes, and said forcefully, “This baby is fine.” Ellen believed her and her panic faded away.

The nurse's name was Ann Christiano. No, it really was. From then on, she tended to us with warmth and kindness and expert skill. She and I tried to figure out where we'd
met before, but we couldn't. In fact, after talking it over, we decided it was unlikely we had ever laid eyes on each other, but the feeling that we were old acquaintances persisted nonetheless. The last time Ellen and I saw her was after the baby came. Mother, father, and child were huddled together, spent, on the narrow hospital bed. Ann Christiano crept in quietly. She raised the bedrail to keep us from tumbling out. She put a blanket over us, all three, and tucked us in—and left us forever. Ellen and I solemnly agreed that, given her name, she must have been an angel sent to us in our hour of need.

When at last our daughter was ready to be born, here is what happened.

I had not been sure what my reaction would be to the gore and mess of childbirth. Some men faint dead away, I've heard, while some don't mind it. I had no way of knowing how I would feel or behave. Birth is a dramatically material business. Great gouts of blood and urine and feces come out of the mother in gushes and floods. From the perspective of a watching husband, it is a deluge that purges your wife of every trace of ladylike delicacy and feminine mystery. This is the woman you love, remember, whose body is erotic to you and alluring in just those places that are now so violently soiled. It's bound to make an impact on a man's mind one way or another, and it would be completely understandable if he were shocked or disgusted or repelled. I wasn't, though. I hadn't known this up to that moment, but it turned out I had the same attitude toward human gore as I'd always had to human depravity: just because it's usually hidden doesn't mean it isn't
always there. When it did become visible, it struck me as a normal thing and I felt no need to look away.