like a billion people had advised me to do—while offering to do it for me, for a fee. Millions, just sitting in a bank, drawing minimal interest. Like me, Jill had said. Just like me.
Well, after those fights we had about how we might spend the money, the desire just slipped out of me, like a teenager out his bedroom window, the parents still sitting cheerily in front of the TV thinking all is well.
I’d woven no web of meaning with my hackneyed gains. And so that’s why the devil and I talked about Jill, how she’d left. After all, the brutal things she had said about my stunted growth came after a huge fight about money—about me not wanting to give her parents any, about me at least thinking about giving my parents a bit. I should have never played favorites like that, even though at the time I didn’t think I was. I really didn’t try to see it from her point of view. Maybe that was the trouble—not only didn’t I try to see anything from her point of view, I discovered that, by and large, I lived a blinded existence, with no real, committed point of view of my own.
The devil promised to help me fix that, and if I worked at it, he said, I’d discover within myself a true writer. But more of that later. First, Jill.
3
We sat and talked. Believe it or not, the devil is very easy to talk to. When he wanted something out of you, he never interrupted much, just the occasional “I see” to grease along the flow of memories. As I began to open up, he immediately grew a little goatee that he could stroke as I talked, muttering “Ah ha” every now and then. I knew he was dying for me to say he looked just like Sigmund Freud, but I didn’t. Already I recognized his angle—he’d take credit for creating psychoanalysis. He stood behind every big event, every creative genius, if you believed him. Sometimes I did. Like falling into a river, going with the flow—easier than swimming upstream.
Well, about Jill. My little Christmas book made a bundle. As far as Jill’s parents were concerned, I went from being the bastard who kept their little girl from being married in the Church to the bastard who kept their little girl from being married in the Church who was better off than them now.
So, as you see, things didn’t really change all that much.
Still, they knew I’d been at the divinity school at Chicago, studying theology (at least he had the good sense to study a Catholic, I once heard Jill’s dad say to her). I had thoughts of being a minister at one time, but I could never really see myself doing the sorts of things a pastor has to do. Jill had filled them in on this aborted bit of career-day mulling, so her parents had decided that, in whatever bizarre or cultish way, I was supposed to be somehow religious.
Jill’s mother shook with excitement as she laid out her plan for some of my money.
Shrineland. They wanted to create Shrineland. She rushed through a prepared speech. There would be rides for the kids (The Jordan River Canoe Ride, The Temple Maze, Lazarus’s Cave, the Wise Men’s Camel Ride, and Jonah’s Big Whale Ride represented the Bible rides; the saints would have rides such as St. Francis’s Bird of Prey, which isn’t how I remember St. Francis thinking about birds; the haunted house would be called Purgatory Pit; two open-air pavilions for the adults—one devoted to music and drink (Gregory’s Chants and Chardonnays) and one for religious drama (think Obergammerau and the passion play; only instead of mountains think of mosquitoes big as mountains coming after you—we’re talking Wisconsin, after all).
But, of course, the big attraction would be the shrines.
Covered moving sidewalks, that’s what Jill’s folks had in mind. That way, rain or shine, the shrine route could be run even during inclement weather. We’re talking miles of covered walks.
Apparently, Jill’s parents overestimated what even a best-selling author makes.
But it wasn’t just the money. It’s the fact that, well, it was a stupid idea.
I’ve noticed that, even if parents are held in scorn by sons and daughters, they’re still off limits for everyone else. Jill had said often enough that her parents were crazy, bonkers, off the deep end. And I didn’t even say that Jill’s parents were stupid; just that their idea was.
Jill took it for the same thing.
And I made sure she was the one to tell them “no.”
I wasn’t making things easy on myself.
But we were at least in the process of mending fences somewhat when, out of the blue, my parents showed up. And they had their pastor with them.
Gyms for Jesus. That’s why my parents were there, pastor in tow. To pitch Gyms for Jesus.
Of course, it would start at my parents’ church. A big gym would be built; Christian virtues would be taught alongside basketball skills—jump shots for Jesus, free-throw line of grace (where, yes, the shot is free, but you have to put some of your own effort into it—after all, it was a Methodist church we’re talking about), slam dunk the devil (the devil actually barked a laugh at that one), passing parables, etc. You get the idea.
From the home gym, there would be “missionary” gyms. They would start in Appalachia, but the pastor had big ideas. Even northerners, he decided, could be saved through Gyms for Jesus. Even in Chicago. Put a nice gym in the slums, bam! A whole load of saved welfare kids, ready to jump off the free-lunch wagon and become productive Christian citizens. My parents and their pastor saw this as, possibly, the only thing to save America, morally and financially, it turned out.
When I didn’t say “no” right away, Jill took it to mean that, rather than “our” money, it was really “my” money to do with as I pleased. I did say “no,” finally. When I did, my mother pulled me aside and asked, a stage whisper if I ever heard one, “Is it her, dear? Do we need to keep this our little secret?” Of course, Jill heard. Not throwing my mother from the balcony of the apartment at that point constituted treason, as far as Jill was concerned. For days, all she would say was, “So, blood really is thicker than water. Should’ve known.”
But as I talked, and let all the steam out of my pent-up anger toward Jill, I began to listen to myself. I made it sound as if everything were fine until she went wacky crazy over these parental schemes. It just brought a few things to the surface, I suppose. Things Jill and I should have talked about but didn’t. A day of wonderful sex followed by a day of silence; a hand-holding afternoon followed by an evening of shouting.
The session, truthfully, helped me. Then the devil had to ruin it a bit, make a little fun, cast his ironic tone over the whole conversation. I got to the end, talking about how, at first, we’d believed love would get us through everything—having no money, parents mad at us, very different backgrounds ethnically and religiously. And such different personalities. Jill was a go-getter; I wasn’t. I think that’s what she meant when she got angry that last time and said I was stunted.
Still, I thought we could work through it (or, actually, I thought we could just slide through it; Jill pushed for the work part and I never picked up on it). It’d just take love. And that’s what I told the devil. Seems funny now, thinking I’d made this final pitch at the end of a sad-sack separation story for love, and to the devil no less! Well, I was green; I’d never spent any real time talking to the devil, so I just blurted out this appeal for love.
Love, I told the devil. We just needed to love more.
I’d had my eyes closed; after a while I didn’t want to deal with looking at the devil’s Sigmund Freud face. Love, I’d said.
Then
