How to Stay Married, page 10
Chapter 13 EXILE FROM THE MAGIC KINGDOM
2017
A few minutes later, I was led to the office of the senior pastor, who, I was told, would be in shortly. This man was handsome, as men of God go, supremely Harrison Ford–ish, with stony Welsh blood, tall and imposing in his thick, heavy black gown: Han Solo’s head on Darth Vader’s body. He’d played baseball at the University of Southern California and worked this fact into every other sermon, but his vibe was all Puritan, his preaching style in the long and proud Reformed tradition, stern and joyless and vaguely disappointed, like a history teacher passing out an exam on which he knows everyone cheated. I will call him the Reverend Doctor Hairshirt.
In his preaching, Hairshirt did not raise his arms or his voice in prophetic howls of indignation. His dominant emotion was amazement, not at God’s goodness or the majesty of creation, but at the fact that more people had not come to church. Incredulity was his love language. Even when he had wondrous insights to share, of divine love and the gift of eternal life through Jesus, say, he expressed these miraculous revelations with the grace of an oncologist announcing that the chemo hadn’t worked. He smiled little from the pulpit unless discussing Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony or, in moments of pure exaltation, the University of Southern California.
I loved Hairshirt’s churlishness. It was hip, in its way. It was also boring. I was not asking to be entertained, but did long to be engaged. In most old mainline churches, sermons live in the head, right at the tiptop of the skull, all exposition and proposition. It gets old quick, even if it’s true. I’ve been powerfully moved by many a sermon over the years, challenged in my thinking, sure, usually when there’s a story. Stories always make you wake up. But Hairshirt repeated his abstractions through inverted rhetorical forms that made me feel insane: “Jesus is God and man. A man and God. God, and also a man. What is he? Two things. And I will tell you what they are. God and man. Man and God. Let me say it again.…”
“We got it!” I wanted to stand and scream.
But then I’d look around and see everyone scrawling in their journals, even my wife. What were they writing? Grocery lists? Meal ideas? I looked at Lauren’s notes:
Poppy seed chicken
Taco soup
Goldfish
Fabric softener
Baby wipes
Every Sunday, Hairshirt’s preaching tilted toward the windmill of contemporary society with every breath. The enemy was Now. Now was bad. Now would strip your family naked and turn your sons into rutting lizards and your daughters into childless foot models. Now would make your husband breed with poker machines and your wife do the Electric Slide. Now would raise your taxes and take your guns, and guns were important because your sons needed alternatives to the imaginary guns of video games, which melted their brains and could make them do terrible things, such as go looking for your guns.
The antidote to Now was Then, back when violence was not celebrated, except when it was being done to people who had behaved undemocratically. In the music of Then, the people really crooned. They didn’t talk about lust and sex, though when they did, they didn’t get so grossly specific about it. Everybody knows that sex talk belongs in medical textbooks, but never in church. Back Then, men wore suits and ladies wore gloves, rather than tampons. Children said ma’am and sir and not I want to kill you with my dad’s gun.
“That sermon just hit me right in my heart!” congregants said as we filed out of the sanctuary, Sunday after Sunday.
“That sermon will give us something to talk about!” they said.
“What a pastor. So wise!”
I felt crazy. Was I crazy?
“Everybody worships this guy,” I often said to Lauren on the way home. “I don’t get it.”
“I liked the sermon,” she’d say.
But now I think I got it. He seemed so fatherly up there in the pulpit, grumpy and disappointed and warning us all about the world’s horrors. The horrors had always seemed so far away, out there, but now they were in my home, and I very much needed a wise father. Mine had been dead for three years.
* * *
Hairshirt opened the door and stepped inside his study, where I sat on the couch, waiting. As soon as he saw me, you could tell he could tell something big was up. He sat down.
“My secretary said you said this was urgent.” He did not look bothered. He looked concerned, which is exactly how you want someone to look in this moment. I told him everything. I just laid it on him, the whole story, or as much of it as I knew.
“Another man?” he said, duly horrified.
“A friend.”
“My goodness. You just never know, do you?”
“You don’t, until you do.” I was crying now.
Hairshirt offered to pray for my marriage. It was a good prayer. In private, here, with me, he could speak freely about real human pain. I was shocked by the particularity of his words, where he said my children’s names and prayed for me to have the boldness to throw myself between the world and my family and for my marriage to be restored. Gone were the subordinate clauses and the King James word bank. He used words like divorce, madness, vengeance. He wanted me to know vengeance belongs to God, not me.
As he prayed, my eyes opened. I finally understood why I loved and hated this church. My highest virtue has always been radical transparency, to a fault: The book you’re holding is proof of that. This, I believe, is how you heal. Banish sorrow by shining light on it. This is why the prayers and sermons and discourse of this church always felt so bogus. They weren’t lying, covering up, pretending we were all perfect. They were just intensely private people. They came from a different century. It was just not my century.
After his prayer, I entreated him for advice. “What do you think I should do?”
“We could discipline her.”
“Whoa, daddy” is what I was thinking. But what I said was “I’m not sure that would help.”
“We could call her in front of the elders.”
It’s just, I don’t know: Lauren seemed in wholesale revolt against paternalism in all its forms: our marriage, our religion, and this church, too, which she clearly now seemed all too eager to leave. I couldn’t see her ever setting foot in this place again.
“I don’t think she thinks what she’s doing is wrong,” I said.
“We could give it a try.”
“And what if she doesn’t, you know, stop the affair?”
“Excommunication,” he said grimly.
Excommunication: one of those ancient church traditions, formally calling a member to repentance, and if the member won’t recant, expelling the person from membership. But how do you boot a woman from a church she clearly had no problem deserting? Excommunication felt like the placement of medieval leeches upon mortal wounds.
Sitting in Hairshirt’s office, contemplating how this church might help save my marriage through the potent magic of forgiveness, I felt only the same distance, the same vague, bewildered judgment I’ve always felt from so many in the pulpit. This man was no monster. He loved babies and had four sweet children and a wife as funny and pretty as mine. He’s a good man, but he seemed to feel no goodness for Lauren, not then. After he prayed for my family, I took a Kleenex, thanked him for his compassionate offer to have my wife banished like a witch, and left.
* * *
Excommunication hadn’t worked for Lauren’s family, had it? When her father’s affair had been discovered years before and he was unrepentant, he’d been excommunicated and exiled, where he’s lived ever since—first in Alabama and now somewhere in the suburban wastes of Florida. He may be happy now, he may not be, we don’t know. But we know the threat of exile had not sent him running back to his wife, Lauren’s mother. Judgment had only hardened the man’s heart. Thirty years later, he remains estranged from his children, doesn’t even know his grandchildren. Excommunication might have worked a thousand years ago, when banishment from the village church might actually mean you got eaten by wolves in the enchanted forest, which has a way of making you contrite. But these days, was exile really the answer?
I walked to my bike, locked to a trolley sign, and sucked in a great breath of October air. Where was Lauren? Maybe she was with Chad, another hidden rendezvous, working out their new life together. Had any of her church friends known of the affair? Surely someone had. I knew in my heart that someone had to have known. Later, this would be confirmed by Lauren, who confessed that one of her friends had known. It would be many years before I discovered that this woman had said nothing because she was soon to have her own affair. What a church!
In that moment, I saw that our congregation was an exquisitely handsome farce, a Saturday-morning cartoon about a happy land where woodland creatures fart cotton candy and rainbows taste like gumdrops and nothing bad ever happens because nothing bad can ever be allowed to happen because the bad place is somewhere else, out there. These churches are Disney parks of make-believe. When Tinker Bell has diarrhea, you have to clean it up quickly and quietly so as not to ruin the experience for the guests. Brokenness must be banished. The fairy tale must go on.
I pedaled my bike down Bull Street and wondered if I should leave this church the way Lauren was leaving me. I knew Hairshirt was only trying to love us in his paternal and protective and medieval way. I don’t think Hairshirt truly wanted to see Lauren exiled. But when all you have is the hammer of God’s loving judgment, everything looks like it wants to be pounded into the floor of hell. I was grateful for the man’s prayers, but knew I had to leave this church, for the same reason you sometimes have to find a new doctor. Despite its glorious architecture and many beautiful traditions and the good people who tried to be my friend, this place was not a safe place for my family. We didn’t need beatific and pious masquerades. We needed the masks ripped right off.
Chapter 14 BANNERMEN OF LOVE
2017
After class that morning, during which I delivered a lecture on the wonders of literary humor and managed not to have an emo stroke in front of my students, I called some folks. We had a few good friends outside the church, and these people did not offer to stand around my home with pitchforks until Lauren recanted. They said what you want good friends to say when you give them bad news.
They said, “Oh, shit.”
They said, “I don’t know what to say.”
Nobody knew what to say. Although one of them did say something that changed everything. Her name is Angie, a family friend and one of my wife’s colleagues, a woman of Anglican faith who’d been around enough blocks to know a shit show when she saw one.
Angie said, “You’re going to fight for her, right?”
“I love her.” Then I said, “I hate her.”
“Fight for her.”
People had and would say many things to me in the coming days and weeks—I’m so sorry; Let’s go beat this dipshit’s ass; I know a guy; Call my lawyer; Praying for you—but only Angie said, “Fight for her.” I held the phone to my face and looked upward into a sky so painfully blue you almost wanted to cry for the beauty, and I thought, “You know, that’s not the worst idea.”
* * *
Love is never a bad call. It might seem impossible. It might even seem silly when every atom in your body screams for blood. But how else, other than with love, can a broken thing be made whole again? The book of Ezekiel says God likes to work on broken things, to build up the ruined places and plant the desolate land. Our church leaders seemed to have little interest in building up the ruined earth of my marriage. It was Angie and others, newer friends such as Jimbo and Jason, who suggested mercy might be the better way. It was they who encouraged me to stop imagining how judgment would work and start trying to imagine how love might.
I soon turned to these other friends, outside the storied fortress walls of Independent, for help. I’d only known Jimbo and Jason for a couple of years. Our kids went to the same school. Jimbo is a marriage and family therapist, and unlike so many Southern men who strut about in the pallor of their virile achievements, he had no problem weeping in front of his friends. His heart was big as an ocean, and that’s what I needed. Jason, a former missionary who’d coached basketball in Uganda and now taught high school English, is a writer who seemed, from the very first, incapable of bullshit. I needed these men in my life. I needed people who would show compassion and speak the opposite of fantasy and vengeance. There would be others like them in the days and years ahead, an army of goodness who would stand behind me like bannermen.
* * *
In the aftermath of her revelation, I’m pretty sure Lauren believed I would be so overwhelmed by her passion for Chad that I would banish myself from my own home, at which time Chad could move all his cargo shorts into the house, but I was going nowhere. I didn’t quite know what fight for her meant, but I figured it did not mean leaving.
The next afternoon, before the girls got home from school, we stood there in the kitchen.
“I’m not leaving,” I said. “I don’t know what you thought would happen.”
“You can’t kick me out.”
“So then we’ll live here together. Fun!”
Every human on the planet, I tried to explain, would agree that she should be the one to leave. I wanted to love her, to fight for her, but like an old pickup out of alignment, I kept listing to the judgmental side of the road, where she might be punished. They say to follow your heart, but my heart wanted to hurt her, and I think that’s precisely what she wanted me to do, too. If she was lucky, I might work up a decent lather and spew and rage and speak unspeakably hurtful things that could never be forgiven and get so fired up I punched one of those toxic masculinity holes in the drywall, which would allow her to call the police and demand my immediate extraction from the home. It would make things so much easier for her if I would just leave, pleasantly or violently, whatever it took.
“I want to drive you somewhere,” I said.
I think she hoped I would drive us both into one of our city’s many deep waterways, but instead I drove her to a hotel and walked her up to a door on the third floor. Was I about to smother her with a pillow and leave her for dead? It seemed like that’s what she wanted.
I knocked and her sister, Shelby, who had driven all day from Alabama, opened the door. I left them alone to do what sisters do. I hoped her big sister might knock some sense into her or at least get Lauren drunk enough to talk. What would they speak about? Would there be unearthing of family traumas? Recriminations? Of the three siblings, Shelby, the oldest, a mother of three and the wife of an interventional cardiologist, is the most likely to have been a prosecuting attorney disbarred for making witnesses cry with passive-aggressive statements about their bangs. She can be brutal. I once attempted to flirt with her our freshman year of college, complimenting her sandals before class. She didn’t respond, just glared at me with a scowl that would’ve liquefied helium, for which I repaid her many years later by marrying into her family and sitting next to her every Thanksgiving.
I loved Shelby’s dogged love of law and order, her refusal to coddle. She would not urge Lauren to seek her bliss with Chad, I knew that much. She would, I hoped, perform an emotional Heimlich to dislodge this man from my wife’s heart in a way that only a big sister can.
It had been mere hours before when I called Shelby to tell her what had happened, and this woman, who had so often found me foolish and tiresome, said, “Do you need me to come?”
“Yes.”
I wept on the phone, and Shelby, a good six hours from us, said she was on her way.
Now they sat in a hotel room together, saying God knows what.
Later that night, Shelby texted, “We’re eating Mexican. We’re drinking. I think things will be okay.”
* * *
Okayness seemed impossible. The next morning, I got the girls ready for school as Shelby drove Lauren for an emergency therapy session with a counselor recommended by a friend. I received a text after lunch from Lauren:
“I’m coming home this afternoon.”
“Okay,” I said.
Would she demand a separation? Offer me joint custody if I would agree to leave? I arranged for the girls to be elsewhere after school and left work early and waited for Lauren to come home. I waited, and waited, and still she did not come. Three o’clock, four, five, six, nothing. I panicked. Where was she? Shelby did not know. Lauren would not answer.
She was gone. Eloped with Chad. Dead, maybe. Who knew. The gentle rhythms of my life had given way to chaos. How astonishing to believe, with fair certainty, that your wife, who two days ago had been one of the sanest and strongest people you knew, was quite possibly bleeding out in a Honda Pilot in a far corner of a Target parking lot, having made everyone’s choices all the easier. Tragic, but clean. This, too, was not the worst idea, though I felt shitty for thinking it.
Then, just before seven, she pulled into the driveway.
She came through the back door, eyes red.
“I ended it,” she said. “It’s over. I told him it’s over.”
Her words limped out into the air like a flag of surrender. Here was my victory, though I cannot say my mood was all that victorious. Lauren looked like a woman who’d just come back from putting down the family mule.
* * *
The next morning, I found her in our bedroom. She stood in front of a large mirror. Our eyes met in her reflection, and I saw in her so much rage. I tried hard to see every good thing she’d ever done in her life, for me, for our girls. I tried not to see the betrayal. I tried to see through it to the thing underneath.
She said, “This marriage is a prison.”
“I’m going to stay in the prison with you. We’ll bust out together.”
