white baby grand, lyrics rolling out of his mouth with a lilting melody, for all the world sounding like Karen Carpenter, crooning on about the world needing “love, sweet love.” And as he sang, the devil morphed into Karen Carpenter (which means he wasn’t being careful; Richard, her brother, was the piano player, not Karen). My face turned red, him making fun of my confession, especially after I had said I still loved Jill. And as he sang, Karen got thinner and thinner, leaving only a skeleton. Poor Karen; musical sweetheart of the seventies, ravaged by anorexia. A sad end for a girl with such a sunshiny smile.
“Love and food,” the devil declared after he finished his performance. “The world needs both.”
“That’s pretty cruel,” I said, again not giving much thought (it was the first day, all right?) to whom I was speaking.
“Cruel?” the devil said, hurt peeking around the edges of his voice. “Cruel?”
He stood up. With a whisk of his hand the piano disappeared. By the time he came over to where I sat, he was JFK Jr. again.
“Cruel?” he asked, left eyebrow arching up like a third-rate actor’s. “Let me tell you what’s cruel,” he said. “It’s cruel to let the notion get out that love takes care of everything. Maybe love’s great, I don’t know. But what I do know is this. Without food, you DO die. And there seems to be a whole lotta love in the world for there to be so many starving people.”
“Well, sure, but . . .” I began.
“But what?” the devil asked. “There is no ‘but’ that makes it okay for mommas to watch their babies die of hunger. And not just physical hunger. Poor Karen, I think she had some love, but she was missing something. Some food of some kind. And she starved, inside and out, because, baby, love ain’t enough.”
“Love,” the devil went on. “About as useless an idea as you can have.”
He threw himself down into the chair next to me.
“I loved Jill,” I persisted. “I do love Jill. Now.”
“And that’s just great, sonny boy,” the devil said, casting a tragic look my way. “But don’t you know by now? It makes no difference in the way the world runs. That’s the big lie. A great feeling, everyone agrees.” Then his eyes narrowed as he leaned over toward me, bringing me into his orbit, his sphere, his confidence. With a tone of a fellow conspirator, voice low, he asked, “But it don’t really pay the bills, now does it?” Then he winked and said, “And make no mistake. Whether it’s the gas company, or the tax man, or God, or the devil, or you and Jill, or you and anybody else, even those who say they love you the most, your own flesh-and-blood parents, it all finally comes down to paying the piper.”
That’s all he said. But suddenly a wave of images splashed across my mind, the strongest being my parents, sitting there, wanting something from me. Gyms for Jesus. That was the bill. I’d been fed, clothed, sheltered; I’d taken their time, their money, their love. And the bill had come due, and I hadn’t paid up. And because I wouldn’t put out the cash, the bill had been paid out of the stock of love and affection they had for me. I knew it as soon as I saw the look on their faces. The bank account of affection had been overdrawn to pay what I owed. I’d still be their son; they’d send cards at Christmas; they’d call now and again because they’d see it as their duty. But the relationship had fundamentally changed when I skipped town on the debt.
I’d never thought of my relationship with my parents in that way. And then the images of Jill came.
“You see?” the devil continued, as if on cue. How could he have known what I had seen, or experienced?
“Did you do that?” I asked.
“Do what?” he smiled back at me.
“Put all that in my head, all the . . . stuff I just saw.”
“Timothy,” the devil said, reaching over and putting his hand on mine. “I am here to teach. You want more. I’ll help you be more. But it means seeing life the way it really is. Did I put those things in your head? No. Did I open the door a little so that you could see what’s already there? Yes.”
I bowed my head, as if ashamed, as if the weight of the world’s failure were on my head. “It’s not enough, is it?” I asked weakly.
“Love? No, it’s not. Not the way this world’s set up.” Then he muttered under his breath, “Wonder whose fault that is?”
I called out Jill’s name, and I cried. But when I looked up, no one was there.
So I got up and went over to my desk. Floodgates had opened within me. No, that’s not right. That makes it sound as if the waters continued, the waves washing over me as they had when the devil had opened my mind to the complexities, the frailties, and the ledger-balance nature of human love along with its inabilities, its failures, its broken promises. No, at the computer keyboard it was different. I had felt all that; experienced it. But sitting before my computer, I was transformed. The devil had been gone just a few minutes, but the experience felt an eternity away. And now. The experiences opened up to me, the images that cascaded from my mind, pulling, yanking, tugging every emotional rope in my psyche, had now become simply data.
I stood in a vast cavern, frozen, the floods of memory now icy monuments, hard as stone. And I began to examine them, know them. I caressed the cold outlines of everything I had seen. Yes, I thought, this is it. To see, to have the experience is one thing. But to examine it, that’s another.
To recognize the experience of love, I saw, was a first step; to be carried away by the sudden recognition of its costs, another; but to be able to describe it in its deliciously detailed intricacy, that was the writer’s gift, or so I thought.
And so I wrote. Not a story, not a novel, but scenes. I knew this to be practice, to get good at writing these telling scenes, these rip-the-veil-from-the-reader’s-eyes scenes that would uncover the nature of human existence. And building on these scenes of frozen emotion, I would build a fortress of solitude, and my insights would result in The Great American Novel.
I was on a tear; I wrote a hundred scenes; then I deleted them all. Real practice, not pretend. And then I slept satisfied, but not without dreams. A dwarf in a cave came to me, and over and over he sang, a beautiful tenor voice I was sure I knew but couldn’t quite place:
Das ist nun der Liebe
schlimmer Lohn!
Das der Sorgen
schmählicher Sold!
In my dream, of a sudden, I knew myself not to be in a cave, but in an audience, watching an opera on stage. I turned to the man to my right, starting to ask what the song meant. It was too dark to see him, but his warm breath fell on my ear as he repeated the song, but with words in English:
Now that’s awful compensation for love!
That’s disgraceful reward for my care!
And as I looked back up on stage, the dwarf and cave were gone, and it was only Jill and me in our apartment, bickering. Then it switched to my home, as a child; then to Jill’s. Homely love, made nothing but homely by the perspective of song.
4
Frantic days of writing—just for practice, so every computer
