which doesn't bother me because, to my mind, it's just a convenient personalizing
pronoun, not a precise anatomical description or a cause for revolution. Of course, I don't
mind if people call God "Her," and I understand the urge to do so. Again--to me, these
are both equal terms, equally adequate and inadequate. Though I do think the
capitalization of either pronoun is a nice touch, a small politeness in the presence of the
divine.
Culturally, though not theologically, I'm a Christian. I was born a Protestant of the white
Anglo-Saxon persuasion. And while I do love that great teacher of peace who was called
Jesus, and while I do reserve the right to ask myself in certain trying situations what
indeed He would do, I can't swallow that one fixed rule of Christianity insisting that
Christ is the only path to God. Strictly speaking, then, I cannot call myself a Christian.
Most of the Christians I know accept my feelings on this with grace and
open-mindedness. Then again, most of the Christians I know don't speak very strictly. To
those who do speak (and think) strictly, all I can do here is offer my regrets for any hurt
feelings and now excuse myself from their business.
Traditionally, I have responded to the transcendent mystics of all religions. I have always
responded with breathless excitement to anyone who has ever said that God does not live
in a dogmatic scripture or in a distant throne in the sky, but instead abides very close to
us indeed--much closer than we can imagine, breathing right through our own hearts. I
respond with gratitude to anyone who has ever voyaged to the center of that heart, and
who has then returned to the world with a report for the rest of us that God is an
experience of supreme love. In every religious tradition on earth, there have always been
mystical saints and transcendents who report exactly this experience. Unfortunately many
of them have ended up arrested and killed. Still, I think very highly of them.
In the end, what I have come to believe about God is simple. It's like this--I used to have
this really great dog. She came from the pound. She was a mixture of about ten different
breeds, but seemed to have inherited the finest features of them all. She was brown.
When people asked me, "What kind of dog is that?" I would always give the same answer:
"She's a brown dog." Similarly, when the question is raised, "What kind of God do you
believe in?" my answer is easy: "I believe in a magnificent God."4 4 4 4
Of course, I've had a lot of time to formulate my opinions about divinity since that night
on the bathroom floor when I spoke to God directly for the first time. In the middle of
that dark November crisis, though, I was not interested in formulating my views on
theology. I was interested only in saving my life. I had finally noticed that I seemed to
have reached a state of hopeless and life-threatening despair, and it occurred to me that
sometimes people in this state will approach God for help. I think I'd read that in a book
somewhere.
What I said to God through my gasping sobs was something like this: "Hello, God. How
are you? I'm Liz. It's nice to meet you."
That's right--I was speaking to the creator of the universe as though we'd just been
introduced at a cocktail party. But we work with what we know in this life, and these are
the words I always use at the beginning of a relationship. In fact, it was all I could do to
stop myself from saying, "I've always been a big fan of your work . . ."
"I'm sorry to bother you so late at night," I continued. "But I'm in serious trouble. And I'm
sorry I haven't ever spoken directly to you before, but I do hope I have always expressed
ample gratitude for all the blessings that you've given me in my life."
This thought caused me to sob even harder. God waited me out. I pulled myself together
enough to go on: "I am not an expert at praying, as you know. But can you please help
me? I am in desperate need of help. I don't know what to do. I need an answer. Please tell
me what to do. Please tell me what to do. Please tell me what to do . . ."
And so the prayer narrowed itself down to that simple entreaty-- Please tell me what to
do-- repeated again and again. I don't know how many times I begged. I only know that I
begged like someone who was pleading for her life. And the crying went on forever.
Until--quite abruptly--it stopped.
Quite abruptly, I found that I was not crying anymore. I'd stopped crying, in fact, in
mid-sob. My misery had been completely vacuumed out of me. I lifted my forehead off
the floor and sat up in surprise, wondering if I would see now some Great Being who had
taken my weeping away. But nobody was there. I was just alone. But not really alone,
either. I was surrounded by something I can only describe as a little pocket of silence--a
silence so rare that I didn't want to exhale, for fear of scaring it off. I was seamlessly still.
I don't know when I'd ever felt such stillness.
Then I heard a voice. Please don't be alarmed--it was not an Old Testament Hollywood
Charlton Heston voice, nor was it a voice telling me I must build a baseball field in my
backyard. It was merely my own voice, speaking from within my own self. But this was
my voice as I had never heard it before. This was my voice, but perfectly wise, calm and
compassionate. This was what my voice would sound like if I'd only ever experienced
love and certainty in my life. How can I describe the warmth of affection in that voice, asit gave me the answer that would forever seal my faith in the divine?
The voice said: Go back to bed, Liz.
I exhaled.
It was so immediately clear that this was the only thing to do. I would not have accepted
any other answer. I would not have trusted a great booming voice that said either: You
Must Divorce Your Husband! or You Must Not Divorce Your Husband! Because that's not
true wisdom. True wisdom gives the only possible answer at any given moment, and that
night, going back to bed was the only possible answer. Go back to bed, said this
omniscient interior voice, because you don't need to know the final answer right now, at
three o'clock in the morning on a Thursday in November. Go back to bed, because I love
you. Go back to bed, because the only thing you need to do for now is get some rest and
take good care of yourself until you do know the answer. Go back to bed so that, when
the tempest comes, you'll be strong enough to deal with it. And the tempest is coming,
dear one. Very soon. But not tonight. Therefore:
Go back to bed, Liz.
In a way, this little episode had all the hallmarks of a typical Christian conversion
experience--the dark night of the soul, the call for help, the responding voice, the sense of
transformation. But I would not say that this was a religious conversion for me, not in
that traditional manner of being born again or saved. Instead, I would call what happened
that night the beginning of a religious conversation. The first words of an open and
exploratory dialogue that would, ultimately, bring me very close to God, indeed.
5 5 5 5
If I'd had any way of knowing that things were--as Lily Tomlin once said--going to get a
whole lot worse before they got worse, I'm not sure how well I would have slept that
night. But seven very difficult months later, I did leave my husband. When I finally made
that decision, I thought the worst of it was over. This only shows how little I knew about
divorce.
There was once a cartoon in The New Yorker magazine. Two women talking, one saying
to the other: "If you really want to get to know someone, you have to divorce him." Of
course, my experience was the opposite. I would say that if you really want to STOP
knowing someone, you have to divorce him. Or her. Because this is what happened
between me and my husband. I believe that we shocked each other by how swiftly we
went from being the people who knew each other best in the world to being a pair of the
most mutually incomprehensible strangers who ever lived. At the bottom of that
strangeness was the abysmal fact that we were both doing something the other person
would never have conceived possible; he never dreamed I would actually leave him, andI never in my wildest imagination thought he would make it so difficult for me to go.
It was my most sincere belief when I left my husband that we could settle our practical
affairs in a few hours with a calculator, some common sense and a bit of goodwill toward
the person we'd once loved. My initial suggestion was that we sell the house and divide
all the assets fifty-fifty; it never occurred to me we'd proceed in any other way. He didn't
find this suggestion fair. So I upped my offer, even suggesting this different kind of
fifty-fifty split: What if he took all the assets and I took all the blame? But not even that
offer would bring a settlement. Now I was at a loss. How do you negotiate once you've
offered everything? I could do nothing now but wait for his counterproposal. My guilt at
having left him forbade me from thinking I should be allowed to keep even a dime of the
money I'd made in the last decade. Moreover, my newfound spirituality made it essential
to me that we not battle. So this was my position--I would neither defend myself from
him, nor would I fight him. For the longest time, against the counsel of all who cared
about me, I resisted even consulting a lawyer, because I considered even that to be an act
of war. I wanted to be all Gandhi about this. I wanted to be all Nelson Mandela about this.
Not realizing at the time that both Gandhi and Mandela were lawyers.
Months passed. My life hung in limbo as I waited to be released, waited to see what the
terms would be. We were living separately (he had moved into our Manhattan apartment),
but nothing was resolved. Bills piled up, careers stalled, the house fell into ruin and my
husband's silences were broken only by his occasional communications reminding me
what a criminal jerk I was.
And then there was David.
All the complications and traumas of those ugly divorce years were multiplied by the
drama of David--the guy I fell in love with as I was taking leave of my marriage. Did I
say that I "fell in love" with David? What I meant to say is that I dove out of my marriage
and into David's arms exactly the same way a cartoon circus performer dives off a high
platform and into a small cup of water, vanishing completely. I clung to David for escape
from marriage as if he were the last helicopter pulling out of Saigon. I inflicted upon him
my every hope for my salvation and happiness. And, yes, I did love him. But if I could
think of a stronger word than "desperately" to describe how I loved David, I would use
that word here, and desperate love is always the toughest way to do it.
I moved right in with David after I left my husband. He was--is--a gorgeous young man.
A born New Yorker, an actor and writer, with those brown liquid-center Italian eyes that
have always (have I already mentioned this?) unstitched me. Street-smart, independent,
vegetarian, foulmouthed, spiritual, seductive. A rebel poet-Yogi from Yonkers. God's
own sexy rookie shortstop. Bigger than life. Bigger than big. Or at least he was to me.
The first time my best friend Susan heard me talking about him, she took one look at the
high fever in my face and said to me, "Oh my God, baby, you are in so much trouble."
David and I met because he was performing in a play based on short stories I'd written.
He was playing a character I had invented, which is somewhat telling. In desperate love,
it's always like this, isn't it? In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our
partners, demanding that they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when
they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.
But, oh, we had such a great time together during those early months when he was still
my romantic hero and I was still his living dream. It was excitement and compatibility
like I'd never imagined. We invented our own language. We went on day trips and roadtrips. We hiked to the top of things, swam to the bottom of other things, planned the
journeys across the world we would take together. We had more fun waiting in line
together at the Department of Motor Vehicles than most couples have on their
honey-moons. We gave each other the same nickname, so there would be no separation
between us. We made goals, vows, promises and dinner together. He read books to me,
and he did my laundry. (The first time that happened, I called Susan to report the marvel
in astonishment, like I'd just seen a camel using a pay phone. I said, "A man just did my
laundry! And he even hand-washed my delicates!" And she repeated: "Oh my God, baby,
you are in so much trouble.")
The first summer of Liz and David looked like the falling-in-love montage of every
romantic movie you've ever seen, right down to the splashing in the surf and the running
hand-in-hand through the golden meadows at twilight. At this time I was still thinking my
divorce might actually proceed gracefully, though I was giving my husband the summer
off from talking about it so we could both cool down. Anyway, it was so easy not to think
about all that loss in the midst of such happiness. Then that summer (otherwise known as
"the reprieve") ended.
On September 9, 2001, I met with my husband face-to-face for the last time, not realizing
that every future meeting would necessitate lawyers between us, to mediate. We had
dinner in a restaurant. I tried to talk about our separation, but all we did was fight. He let
me know that I was a liar and a traitor and that he hated me and would never speak to me
again. Two mornings later I woke up after a troubled night's sleep to find that hijacked
airplanes were crashing into the two tallest buildings of my city, as everything invincible
that had once stood together now became a smoldering avalanche of ruin. I called my
