1: Eros
I put pen to paper with no thought of justifying myself, but with the single purpose that has guided me since my rebirth in God many years ago: to glorify Him and his Son Jesus Christ. I'm a humble man, conscious of my shortcomings. If I'm also strong, my strength arises from my faith and I don't apologize for it. Yet my story seems, at the outset, impossible to tell, marked by trial after unfathomable trial, by failure and embarrassment, by the world's scorn. But I will tell it, because in the end my Faith abides, and for this I give all glory to the Father.
I wasn't always a man of faith, even though born in the American Midwest between the world wars to God-fearing parents, and under the religious influence throughout my childhood of a kind, loving, Christian grandmother. I was conventionally religious until my teens, when I fell into some kind of untutored doubt, which was abetted by four years of a highly secular college education, then marriage, the birth of children, and preoccupation with building a career. Those were my years in the wilderness. As will happen in the wilderness, I lost my way. Losing my way, I fell into isolation and despair. And my despair led to the miracle through which, by the astonishing grace of God, I was saved.
There was a young girl working in a flower shop near the office where I was employed in those days as an administrator in a large company. Her name was Marie, a Catholic, with dark hair and large, green eyes, a soft face and body, and a look of isolation that reflected mine. We might never have met, but one day I got the idea—inspired by nothing I can remember—to bring one red rose home to my wife. I stopped in the flower shop on the way from work, and some signal passed between Marie and me in the five minutes it took to choose, wrap and pay for the rose. She knew I wore a wedding ring—saw it when I handed her the money—but some shared need made us stop and look each into the other's face with an intensity that I have never experienced in a first meeting, before or since. I was haunted. I took the rose home to my wife. She was touched and happy. But the sense of isolation that had been growing in me for years seemed to balloon at that moment. My wife was young and pretty, but I felt as if I were looking at her through the wrong end of a telescope. Our two small daughters, playing nearby, were beautiful. But I felt myself shivering and abandoned.
The following day, after work, I went to the flower shop again and bought another rose from Marie. As she handed me the rose and I handed her the money, I bent close and asked quietly, not to be overheard, to meet her somewhere away from the shop. She looked frightened but whispered "Yes."
"I'm married," I said.
"I know," she said. "And I'm engaged to be married."
I thanked her for the rose and, very agitated, left the shop. I couldn't take this rose to my wife; I carried it back to my office, deserted after hours, and left it in a vase on my desk.
In the days that followed I struggled to think of some means of meeting Marie—whose name I didn't yet know—without being detected by my wife. Lying was difficult for me. My religious upbringing had imbued me with the conviction that lying was a sin as grave as any, and—irreligious as I may have been at that time—the requirement to lie filled me with such anxiety and guilt that I felt sure I couldn't lie and be believed. I couldn't share my anxiety with my wife, who I was certain loved me. My despair and isolation deepened.
Eventually I thought I saw an opportunity to meet Marie without disrupting my family. Because the flower shop was open weekends, I guessed that Marie's work schedule provided for days off during the week. I was in a salaried job, with some latitude to make my own schedule. So one day at lunchtime I found Marie alone in the shop and, with great anxiety on both sides, arranged to meet her at mid-morning the next Tuesday, her day off.
What followed has seemed to me in later years the very epitome of allegiance to a false god. We met as arranged, drove out of the city in my car in order to avoid being seen by acquaintances of either of us, and fell into hellish circumstances that seemed a Heaven then.
She was only twenty years old—nearly ten years younger than I—and the only woman other than my wife I had ever been intimate with. I tell this story in some detail, not because I approve of what we did, but because the entire experience was unique in my life, events out of time, an object lesson in wrong behavior. From it I learned how seductive a false god can be, and how hard it can be—impossible, really, without Grace—to tell a false god from the true One.
We fell into a terrible, harrowing love that first day, each knowing barely more about the other than a name. She was engaged to be married in six months, the date and the place already chosen. She and her fiancé were taking prenuptial instruction from their priest. Marie knew I had a wife and daughters. But a vast longing, an inexplicable loneliness, an impression, though false, that we had been forsaken by God, drew us irresistibly together.
We drove to the country, stopped by woods, walked into them, removed each other's clothing and would have made love, but Marie was virgo intacta and resolved to protect this sign of innocence until her wedding. Mad with irrelation and thwarted need, we tore at each other's bodies, kissing, biting, crushing, but never penetrating. We talked and talked. We had nothing to say that wasn't of hunger and loss. She was an uneducated shopgirl; I was a relative sophisticate, with pretensions to ideas and a nagging certainty of the importance of things unseen. Really, we couldn't communicate, and this failure sharpened our anguish and our sorrow. And it seemed to me we were both beautiful: she with her long, black hair spread on the pine needles covering the forest floor, her white body with its pink nipples and vivid thicket of pubic hair, her huge, green, beseeching eyes; I young then, with a slender body and broad, well-wrought shoulders, vibrant with physical strength and electric with sexual force, priapian, graceful. By an unspoken agreement, we did nothing that first day to give ourselves or each other physical relief. We strained for hours at the verge of detumescence, kissing and clinging to each other. Her virginity, immense and totemic, stood between us like a wall. Her fear was manifest: fear of losing her virginity, and with it any hope for the plans she had ordered for her life.
I felt the complementary fear: that if I took her virginity I'd be responsible for whatever life was left for her, and would lose the life I had with my wife and children. We lay together in an agony of challenged trust, tormented by love and desperate for a shared peace and safety, while our moral irresolution turned into the physical pain of thwarted release. I could see in her eyes the pain in her congested pelvis, a reflection of the debilitating ache in my own lower torso and testicles. So we suffered. So began our passion.
Late in the afternoon we dressed and drove back to the city, and I dropped Marie where I had picked her up. Parting was cruel; we were in several kinds of pain, sunk in confusion, burdened with a mighty secret, foreseeing only difficulty. Circumspect, afraid of being observed, we kissed and separated, she to keep her own counsel with her family and fiancé, I to go home to a new regime of secrecy, lies by omission, the attendant guilt.
In the weeks that followed, Marie and I continued to meet. We found a motel and moved indoors. Each meeting consisted of hours in a bed conserving Marie's hymen. The fear and diffidence of our first meeting slowly gave way to such trust that by our third meeting we could engage freely and happily in fondlings and manipulations that, without endangering Marie's intactness, gave both of us sexual release. But in that process we lost any hope of falling out of love.
Even in our ecstasy there was just one topic between us: our loneliness and isolation. We talked about the flower shop and my work, but the invariable subtext was Marie's interior estrangement from her fiancé and my felt distance from the world and the nearest part of it to me, my wife. In our motel room we clung together, not knowing where to go or what to do, neither of us willing to forsake the other or our other lives. When we tried to imagine keeping and living our secret even after Marie was married, anxiety overwhelmed us.
Then, rather soon, we got caught.
One day when Marie and I had been meeting for about two months, my wife phoned my office and was told by a co-worker that I was out for the afternoon on an unspecified errand. When I arrived home that night she asked where I'd been, and I had no answer.
If the moral training of my childhood had not disabled me as a liar, her question would have been easy to deflect. She asked it without suspicion, almost without curiosity. But the only idea that came to me when she asked was the idea of my guilt. My face discomposed itself; she saw. Her own face registered fear and shock, and we both began to cry.
Then followed what seems in retrospect an absurd series of gestures by the three of us—Marie, my wife and me—to save everything and lose nothing. First my wife wanted to meet Marie. I think she felt sure of the sanctity of her own relationship with me, and believed that she could convey to Marie a sense of the fitness of Marie giving me up. I loved and wanted both women; I hoped a meeting between them would inspire tolerance in my wife and confidence in Marie, so that I could love them both without guilt.
Accordingly I went to Marie, told her my wife had discovered us, and asked if they could meet. Marie shrank in terror. Her green eyes started in her pale face and she seemed about to faint. I took her in my arms and held her while she regained her strength.
"Are you crazy?" she asked me. "You're crazy." We had been walking in a city park. She collapsed onto a bench. "What happened? How did she find out?"
"She just did," I said. "She asked me and I told her."
"If Kevin found out, he'd kill me. Really, I think he might kill me."
"Well," I said. "Beth won't kill anybody. She just wants to talk."
Marie sat on the park bench pressing her hands together in her lap and looking stricken. Guilt assailed me. But I sensed her poise, her courage and devotion, and I loved Marie more than ever. Finally she said, "I'll meet her if you want me to." I was thrilled and relieved. Recreant that I was, I foresaw plain sailing.
The meeting took place one evening at my house, after our daughters were in bed. Marie arrived in her old car, pale, pretty and nervous, deferential when I introduced her. Her hair was down and she was wearing shapeless clothing calculated to disarm a woman, not the modish dresses I was used to. Beth was informal but almost imperious, as convinced of her territorial hegemony as Marie must have been of her own foreignness. Seeing these two women, lovely, vital and my sexual intimates, facing each other across the kitchen table and preparing negotiations to share me, filled me with pride and awe. I slipped away to the living room and tried to occupy myself with a newspaper. Not more than ten or fifteen minutes passed, though, before I heard their voices in the hallway, the sound of the front door, and Beth returning to the kitchen. I caught Marie at the door of her car.
"What happened?" I asked.
"What do you think?" she said. "She wants me to stay away from you."
But for the idolatry I'd fallen into, this might have been the end of a misadventure that threatened destruction for so many innocents. I might have thanked Marie for her goodness to me and her courage in facing my wife, kissed her farewell and gone back indoors to my family. But when I thought of giving her up, a pit of isolation, loneliness and terror yawned in me. Marie was my necessary and only resort. I hungered for her like humanity in search of Faith. "This can't be," I said.
"What are you going to do?" She stared at me, her eyes forlorn but dry under the street lamp.
"My best," I said. I kissed her. She drove away and I went back indoors.
Our next gesture was to separate, my wife and I. This was the upshot of two weeks of densely concerted introspection and debate. In these circumstances she was the rationalist and I the hysteric. The less sure I seemed of my intentions with Marie, the more determined Beth became to forge some kind of certainty for herself. She would not let me temporize: I either had to declare my affair with Marie at an end and return to the status quo ante, or I had to move away from home and make up my mind. But I knew, whatever my intentions, that I could not give up Marie just then. So I asked for time to think, and we separated. I agreed with Beth on a schedule to visit my daughters and I went away and rented a tiny apartment—a sitting room with a bed.
All at once I was relieved of the logistical difficulties inherent in carrying on an affair from one's place of work. I no longer had to devise sites and schemes for meeting Marie on weekdays. Subject to her own ability to evade detection by her fiancé, we could meet at my apartment virtually at will. Neither of us had ever had a trysting place before. Our shared loneliness, our predilection for secrecy, the risk we were running of the loss or devastation of others we loved, the necessity to preserve the signs of Marie's virginity: these made our hours in the apartment poignant beyond imagining. We were in a continuous state of sexual and spiritual longing. This was my first—Godless—experience of ecstasy.
The last, best gesture was Beth's. When I came to our house to visit my daughters a few times each week, my wife let me back into our bed. I don't know what she felt. My own experience, in spite of the secrets I carried, was of greater closeness to her than ever before. It was as if, for the first time, I had in Marie a gift so privately and particularly my own that I could afford to give all of myself—except my secrets—to Beth. And so sex with my wife became an ecstasy as well.
I was in a precarious paradise. If ever a life of bliss teetered on the brink of doom, this was it. My—(my!)—happiness depended entirely on the maintenance of secrecy, supported on my side by lies of omission and on Marie's by lies of every kind—to her fiancé, to her parents, to her friends. My happiness even seemed to depend on the stoppage of time. We were now within four months of the date of Marie's wedding. It seemed impossible that we could continue our affair indefinitely. But we had no plans to give it up.
The crash came with no warning except for our anxiety. In my Faith, I agree with the dictum that God works in mysterious ways. In my apostasy, it was painful to see my fate being worked in sacramental ways. One Saturday Marie and her fiancé, holiday shopping a few weeks before Christmas, passed a Catholic church and at Kevin's instance went into the confessional. Marie had not confessed in several months and didn't want to confess then, but she was trapped. She could hide and wait while Kevin confessed, but the next morning at Mass, unshriven, she would not be able to take Communion, and Kevin would want to know why. So she made her confession to an unsympathetic priest.
She told me that story on Monday evening while we lay fully dressed on the bed in my apartment. Her forlorn green eyes searched my face for advice, and as usual I didn't know what to do. If I had been two people, one of them would have undressed Marie and consummated our love, body and soul. The other would have lifted her to her feet, wept to express the depth of that love, and let her go forever. I did neither. We lay there immobilized by our sorrow and my fear. But I knew she would leave me. And soon after Christmas she did.
At the saddest season of the year for a Christian apostate, I found myself alone in a bed-sitting room, suddenly unaware of any reason to live. I still had a wife and children, but I felt helpless to go back to them. With the loss of Marie, Beth became strange to me again and I was impotent. We wept. I couldn't tell her what was wrong, because I couldn't tell her what had been right before. My depression was profound. At work I was barely able to maintain appearances. Compulsively I walked past the flower shop for a glimpse of Marie. I feared death, but I feared living more. I consulted a psychiatrist.
Like most of his fraternity in those days, the doctor's training was Freudian, and by the second meeting we had begun to construct an edifice of myth and symbology around my agony. The myth was a lugubrious one and made me weep, but none of its insights conduced to make me well. My depression deepened; it governed my waking hours and disturbed my sleep. I must have looked as gaunt and terrible to the doctor as I looked in my mirror; after a few more meetings he resorted to medicating me.
The medication he prescribed was one of the recently developed mood elevating drugs, fifty tiny, oblate, reddish-brown pills in a plastic cylinder. I began taking these according to instructions, three per day at eight-hour intervals. My despondency did not remit; I even exacerbated it by driving past the flower shop. After four days I emptied the remaining pills onto a table top and counted them; there were thirty-eight. I gathered them back into the palm of my hand. And then, whether impatient or insane, I swallowed them at a gulp. I took a glass of water to sluice the last few down my throat.
That God intervened in my life in those hours is beyond doubt, but I have never known whether He did it before or after the overdose. I lay down on the bed that Marie would never visit again. I felt calm, satisfied to have acted and indifferent to danger, and mourned my loss. A kind of dizzy anesthesia curled around me, my body numb and heavy and my mind sinking into it, as if by gravitation. I might easily have slept then and had no second chance. But as I felt the drug overcoming me, in a wave of pity I remembered my little daughters. I had not made up my mind to die; I had acted impulsively, and now I seemed likely to die a death that could never be justified to them. I had to stop. I found the telephone and gave the dial one full turn for help.
I don't remember that call, but it succeeded. I remember the remote crash of my apartment door frame breaking before the onslaught of a police ambulance crew, the paramedics shouting in my ears and slapping hard and harmlessly at my face, cold air, snow under my dragging feet. I vomited into the snow, thinking: "My body is trying to save itself. My mind doesn't care."
I was unconscious for two days, from Friday until Sunday. I awoke very hungry but well rested, and not surprised, as soon as I remembered myself, to see that I was in a hospital bed. Outside the window it was dark; a lamp burned beside me on a table. In a chair nearby, Beth sat sleeping. She looked sad, distant, exhausted, pathetic and vulnerable. I felt great pity for her, but no longer any love. I thought of Marie and felt no love for her either. It seemed to me my life had started over. I didn't know exactly where I was, or how long ago my old life had ended, but I felt something like exaltation—a calling to a life of Perfection. In the silence and subdued light of the hospital room I sensed the presence of Divinity. After years of my neglect of Him, it was clear that God had saved me, and for some purpose.
I resented Beth's sleeping attendance then. I wanted to be alone with my experience of God, without this unwelcome residuum of the sinful existence from which I knew I had been saved. I thought of my children; they seemed unimportant next to the enormous certainty of Duty and Salvation. I understood that my previous life was over. God had ended it, forgiven me for it, and presented me with a new and thus-far sinless one, and for this l owed Him my devotion and my constant effort to follow a Christ-like path of faultless dedication to His Truth. I felt humble and exalted at the same time—whereupon God tested me.
Beth stirred, awoke, raised her head and saw me looking at her. She started, gasped, burst into tears and threw herself on me, clasping her arms around my neck, kissing my face and sobbing violently. I sought to comfort her by holding her to me and patting her shoulder, but I could not share her emotion. I was in such awe of my covenant with God, and of His expectations of me, that my survival to see my wife and children again seemed trivial.
I foresaw at that moment that my life of faith would entail obligations incompatible with the obligations of my old life. To think of getting lost again in the quotidian particulars of a secular job, family breadwinning and superficial friendships—this oppressed me. The idea of pursuing an illicit love affair filled me with disgust. I believed that my covenant with God required a clean break from old entanglements, so that the burden of any new fault or failure would be entirely my own. I resolved to be divorced from Beth.
The news, when I conveyed it on the day of my release from the hospital, seemed to devastate her. She wept miserably, and I felt tremendous regret. But for my determination to keep faith with the God of my Salvation, I might have faltered in this first step. My daughters, too young to appreciate their parents' struggle, had their mood subsumed in their mother's, and they wailed and clung to my legs when they understood that I was to leave. The tribulations of those first few days were vast.
I returned to the bed-sitting room long enough to pay the landlord for the damage done by the ambulance crew, and then I left, driven out by the unhappy associations of the place. I found another, as small and monkish as the first, but I consecrated this one to my quest for the Godly perfection I could never attain, and the Covenant I would never forswear. I devoted much of my time at home to prayer and meditation. For many years nobody, man or woman, visited me in that place.
Although I knew that I had been saved and that God was real, I struggled to see His face. The war then under way in Vietnam caused me particular distress. I understood that Communism, as a militantly atheistic force, had to be defeated if God's hegemony were to be realized on earth. But I saw the sacrifice of thousands of seemingly innocent noncombatants; I saw friendly-fire accidents in which the righteous killed the righteous; I saw horrendous suffering where quick death would have been the merciful alternative. I prayed to God to understand His purpose in that war. I didn't for a moment doubt His goodness or His mercy, but I longed to see it whole, the better to bear witness among doubters, of whom there were plenty around me.
In some ways I felt more lost at this time than I had felt during my period in the wilderness. I knew that God expected everything of me and that I owed everything to God, but I felt unsure of the path. At night in my tiny apartment I removed my clothes and looked at myself in a long mirror. I was quite beautiful: tall, blond, with a high forehead, deep-set blue eyes, a straight nose, a fine mouth in a line that bespoke my earnestness, a strong jaw, broad shoulders and well-muscled arms, a deep chest tapering to a narrow waist and hips, long, well-formed legs, graceful ankles, gracefully arched feet. It was easy to believe that God had made me in an image close to His and that He had made me for His purposes. But near the geometric center of this beauty was my penis, pale and smooth and rather large, surmounted by a pale shock of pubic hair. I looked at my naked image in the mirror and I shivered. I felt my soul and body at risk. I had no confidence that my penis would not of its own volition rise up against God. I knew that God could break and burn my fragile body whenever He liked. My penis glimmered in the lamplight like a slumbering threat, its role in my salvation problematic. I understood that I must banish every manifestation of sexuality until God had made his purpose plain.
This understanding became the source of my greatest trials. I was young and vital, and my physiology seemed to have a life apart from my will and the life of my spirit. It was the rare morning when I didn't awake with an erection and have to clasp my hands in prayer until the hazard passed. I had lurid dreams of sexual encounters with Beth or Marie, or with women I didn't know but had seen on the street. Usually I'd awake from these dreams in dread and physical frustration, but sometimes I'd sleep through a consummation and awake later with the sticky evidence of my unwilling onanism. My confusion on these occasions was complete. I loved God and was faithful to Him, but the body He had given me seemed to rebel against us both. Yet however weak my flesh, or however strong the Devil's habitation of it, I vowed that my Soul, at least, would never surrender to temptation.
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