Fourteen
years ago my marriage with Lily hit bottom—not quite the rocks, but
bottom. At the time I was leading an overnight retreat for ten
participants at a small convent. Sister Lucia, who was the guest
mistress in charge of the tiny retreat house where we were staying,
was eighty-seven if she was a day. That night, after dinner and after
I had been lecturing all day, several of the retreatants pulled out
bottles of whiskey. Because I’d had a couple of drinks under my
belt, because I was in a good deal of emotional pain at the time, and
because she had such a kindly old face, I found myself sitting at
Sister Lucia’s feet telling her that I was felling badly since I
had failed at my marriage.
Sister
Lucia beamed. “Oh, that’s just wonderful,” she exclaimed.
“Lord,
Scotty,” I thought, “get a couple of drinks in you and you go
shooting your mouth off simply because this little nun’s got a
kindly old face when the reason it’s so kindly is probably because
she’s got no brain left behind it.” I spoke to her again, more
loudly now, the way one does to the senile. “No, no, you didn’t
understand me. I was telling you I’ve failed at my marriage.”
Again
Lucia beamed. “Oh, I’m so glad for you,” she answered.
By
this time I was becoming seriously annoyed. I practically shouted at
her, “No, no, you haven’t heard what I’ve been saying. Probably
you’ve got a hearing problem. You’re quite entitled to have a
hearing problem at your age, my dear. But, anyway, you haven’t
understood anything that I’ve said, so let’s just drop the
subject.”
“I’ve
heard and understood you perfectly, young man,” Sister Lucia
responded, looking at me keenly. “You’ve been telling me that you
have failed at your marriage, and I’m so glad for you. Do you know
how terrible it would be never to fail? Oh, that would be dreadful!”
I
recollected certain people I’d known who felt they had never failed
and thought of just how insufferable they were, and I began to think
that maybe she did have some gray matter left behind those
intelligent eyes. It also occurred to me it was perhaps no accident
that both Sister Lucia and I were attempting to follow a Lord of
Failure, a man executed at an early age in the standard manner of the
day as a petty provincial political criminal, spat upon by his
enemies and betrayed by his friends.
It
is also, I think, no accident that my marriage with Lily began to
considerably improve along about that time. For what happened after
I’d concluded I’d failed at my marriage was that, on a certain
level, I gave up trying to make it work. And that meant I gave up
trying to change Lily. It was also around that same time that Lily
decided she too had failed at the marriage, and also stopped trying
to make it work and trying to change me. Furthermore, I suspect it is
no accident that since that time, both she and I seem to have done a
good deal of changing.
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