After her doctor had finished his consultation we picked up where we’d left off. Then, all at once, she fell back, exhausted. It was that sudden, as though she’d been shot. She no longer had the energy to talk, but she asked me to stay a bit longer. A nurse came to take blood and my friend snapped at her, I no longer remember what, ostensibly, for. (I don’t like that one was all she said later.) The nurse, the picture of professional poise, winked at me as she went out. They are trained to forgive, in cancer care.
I’m so glad you came, my friend said when I kissed her goodbye.
I told her I’d come again, the next day.
What are you doing tonight? Anything?
I told her I was going to hear my ex give a talk.
Oh, him, she said. And she rolled her eyes.
I asked if she’d read the article on which the talk was based and she said that she had.
Nice to see he’s still his old ball-of-fun self, she said.
* * *
—
Recently a story appeared in an anthology, based on a true story familiar to my friend and me because it involved someone we used to know, another old coworker. A man teaching at a university was overcome by the presence in one of his classes of a young man who happened to remind him of the beautiful ephebe who’d been the love and obsession of his youth. Giving in to temptation, he seduced the student and was thrilled when his feelings were returned. A passionate romance ensued, with both men hoping that, despite the generational difference in their ages, their relationship would endure. But after a short time it was revealed that the young man was in fact the professor’s former lover’s son. This discovery set off a series of deep disturbances in the professor’s psyche. He immediately broke off the relationship but was never able to get back to a normal life, becoming so distraught that in the end he killed himself.
I remember that, at the time, what none of us could quite believe was that, until the truth was revealed, this man had managed to ignore not only the clue of the family resemblance, which was in fact striking, but the much bigger clue that his two lovers shared the same surname. Also incredible, that he never once mentioned anything about either of these remarkable “coincidences” to the student, and apparently never sought to learn whether there might be something more behind them.
The power of denial. It’s happened more than once: a girl finds herself giving birth, in a high school bathroom, say, and later reveals that she’d had no idea she was pregnant, the many changes taking place in her body having been attributed by her to—whatever.
The boundless capacity of the human mind for self-delusion: my ex was certainly not wrong about that.
In the published story, which was written by the young (well, no longer young) lover, characters’ genders and other details have been changed so that the student with whom the professor ends up having an affair turns out to be a daughter about whose existence he’d never been told. According to the writer, this was to create a more dramatic conflict and to make the suicide more convincing. Of course, the truth was far more interesting, and my friend was not the only one who felt that the writer had in fact “ruined” the story—forgetting that what had actually happened was not a work of fiction. Some people who were close to the professor were upset to see him turned into a fictional character and thought the story should never have been written or published at all.
But there it is, and now we have it. Another saddest story.
* * *
—
Jesus, du weisst is the title of an Austrian documentary I saw about fifteen years ago and have never got out of my head. Jesus, You Know. Six Catholics are shown, each alone in a different empty church, having agreed to pray aloud while kneeling and facing the camera that has been set up on a tripod in the chancel. These ordinary believers, three men and three women, have a lot on their chests, they have a lot on their minds, there is oh so much that they want to tell Jesus about. The phrase “you know” is repeated several times. (In fact, You Know, Jesus would have been the more accurate title, since it’s the informal conversation filler and not the Lord’s omniscience that is the meaning here.) These intimate one-sided talks, mostly about family problems, are more like something you’d expect to hear a person telling a shrink or a confessor than what comes to mind at the word prayer. Not quite the love letter to God, not the raising of the heart and mind to God or the requesting of good things from him as defined by the Catholic Church.
One woman is depressed because her husband has suffered a stroke and now spends all his time watching bad TV shows. Another complains of a husband who’s cheating on her. Maybe, with Jesus’ help, she can find the right words to make an anonymous call to inform the other woman’s husband. And might Jesus also give her the strength not to murder her husband with the poison that she confesses already to have obtained.
An elderly man emotionlessly questions Jesus about the abuse inflicted on him when he was a child: Why did my father beat me. Why did my mother spit in my face.
A young man goes from bemoaning his parents’ failure to understand his religious devotion to describing his bewildering and sometimes religious erotic fantasies.
A young couple takes turns discussing the unhappiness that has arisen in their relationship because she wants one thing in life and he wants quite another thing.
They drone on and on, the six. There is no other way to put it. As there is no way to ignore the fact that a considerable amount of what we hear from them would have to be called whining. A defensive tone creeps in: each person seems to have felt a pressing need to explain his or her feelings, to present his or her situation as though laying out a case before a judge.
Of the handful of people who were in the audience with me, not everyone stayed till the end.
What the prayers recorded in the film lay bare are depths of loneliness, self-doubt, and sadness. Each supplicant seems to be crying out for love—a love they’ve never found or a love they fear they’re on the verge of losing. Although the people in the film are of different ages and come from different backgrounds, they share two most important things: religion and nationality. What would happen if the director’s experiment were to be repeated with other groups of believers, non-Austrians, non-Catholics—would the results be the same? I think so. Watching the film, hearing the prayers, I felt like a witness to the human condition.
What is prayer and is God even listening are two questions the filmmaker wants the viewer/voyeur to chew on. Me, I left the theater thinking of the popular inspirational command: Be kind, because everyone you meet is going through a struggle.
Often attributed to Plato.
Not long after I saw the documentary, I happened to catch an interview on the radio with the filmmaker John Waters. Asked to make some movie recommendations, he immediately named Jesus, You Know. My favorite holiday movie, he called it (we were in the Christmas season). The people are maddening, John Waters said. And what the movie makes clear is that, if there really was a Supreme Being who had to listen to people’s prayers all the time, he would go out of his mind.