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Coming To Terms
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This is by no means the saddest story I have ever heard, nor for that
matter is it the happiest, but then happy marriages have never seemed any
more alike to me than unhappy ones; and not until I had known Dominique Lo
Bianco more than seven years, by which time she had for quite a while been
Socrates Livadis’ wife and borne him a son, did I have an inkling of how
unhappy they were. Bishop Berkeley was right. Kick any stone! It doesn’t
matter. It’s all in our minds and kicking stones does no more than mash up
your toes and scuff your shoe leather; it proves nothing except how
misleading are our notions of what is real. Not that I consider myself an
authority on reality, but over the almost six decades of my life, I have
observed enough about human life to persuade me that as a species we don’t
see stones or rocks for the obstacles a commonsensical mind might take
them to be. Look at all those agglomerations of stones human beings have
piled up over history! Pyramids and pyres, tombs and towers, all those
monuments to human pride and power, to greed, and yes, just plain can-do
orneriness. Very likely that goes a way towards explaining the kind of
weakness which has afflicted me from boyhood, a sort of flawed vision
which accounts for my admiration for that scrofulous old Englishman whose
dumb answer to the Bishop was to kick a stone, and my inordinate
uneasiness with that brilliant Irish cleric who held that no matter
existed independently of perception — esse est percipii — that all
qualities were known only to the mind; and, moreover, God was always
comfortably out there keeping our world sensible so we could perceive not
only the world’s continuing material existence but behold it in a coherent
and orderly fashion. In heaven’s name, as one of the Bishop’s subsequent
scientific (and Jewish) inheritors would ask, would God ever considering
shooting dice with the universe? No, He would not! Though of course who
can tell these days who is a member of Gamblers Anonymous? Hail to thee,
blithe Bishop of Cloyne, certain as you were that once and for all you had
given the lie to the likes of us weaker mortals who did not blindly
believe and, consequently, fell afoul of godlessness.
All that is exactly the sort of talking and writing that would send
Willy Devlin up the wall. Not that he was confounded by it, only he had no
patience with such abstractions; besides, he didn’t want anyone to imagine
that he might understand them, perhaps didn’t even care to acknowledge to
himself that he did. Such language and anecdote Willy would have taken to
be showing off, putting the Man on or putting on the dog, whatever, and
Willy would have growled, “Why don’t you cut the bullshit, Matthew? All
those fancy words, those recondite — see, I know fancy words too! — Latin
quotes. Get down to it! Tell me like a regular dude what’s bugging you.”
Bugging me? How to speak of being permanently bereft of belief, of
falling away from God, to Willy Devlin in a way that that he would feel
comfortable enough to acknowledge? One way might have been to tell him
that it was like never again having a chance to toke up on Acapulco Gold,
but as you can see, and so too would Willy. that was both a condescension
and reductivism. Yet for all that put-on, Willy was raised a Roman
Catholic, as was Dominique Lo Bianco, strictly, parochially, devoutly, and
probably each of them could still recite all of the Nicene Creed. If none
of that seemed to have taught Willy what being denied God’s presence
meant, Viet Nam surely had. Oh, I forgot to mention that my name is
Matthew Millard, senior professor of literature at St. Bernard’s College
here in Upstate New York, sometime department chairman, erstwhile
businessman, journalist, fiction writer and former passionate devotee of
the arts. All those references you will note are to the past, which is no
accident; it tells you plainly that I am what I am: A has-been. Willy
Devlin sniffed that out quickly enough — he was nothing if not streetwise
shrewd in such matters — but he was kind enough never to make a point of
it. At least not to me. Though confused about success and failure — and
who in America isn’t? — it was a subject with which Willy Devlin was
obsessed, though I doubt he’d have appeared that way to a cursory glance,
including his own, or that Willy would have confessed it even to his
closest friend, if he was aware that it troubled him. Nam and the Marines
had done that for him too, given him what one might rightly call an
essentialist view of success: Success meant having a safe place to sack
out, keeping your feet dry enough to avoid trench foot, eating three meals
and drinking a six-pack a day, and, if you were lucky, blowing enough good
smoke to forget where you were, what you were doing there, and how lonely
and scared you were — even if you had never heard a shot fired in anger.
Once, before I understood what a ninny Blake was for believing that “We
have Art that we may not perish from Truth,” I used to believe that Art —
with a capital A of course — would bring us wisdom, solace, serenity in
the face of tragedy, but in due course I learned better. Such learning
took me the largest part of a lifetime to acquire, but it is another
story, for which I shall not pause here, except suffice it to say that it
is also a part of this story to be ignored at one’s peril.
It was as a consequence of the arts that I first met Dominique Lo
Bianco and much later Willy Devlin. Willy Devlin was never William to
anyone, though that was his given name. If much later I was
half-affectionately, half-sardonically to call him Sir William, the Knight
of the Grail, he allowed me that only in deference to my age and then
uneasily, and if on occasion I changed that name to Don Guillermo to
commemorate the Knight of the Windmills, I do not believe he took it
amiss, although now that it’s all over, who’s to say that such minor
matters were not more important to him by far than they were to me? In any
event, I met Dominique Lo Bianco when she had just turned twenty, a junior
at St. Bernard’s enrolling in the first creative writing workshop I taught
there. It was not a course I was eager to offer, but the powers-that-be
thought it might give the school a bit of cachet, and how eagerly the
school was in search of whatever small distinctions it could unearth.
Given the caliber of the school, I thought few enough would be interested
in the course and that those who were would not probably be able to write
a simple declarative sentence. I was quite right about that, but in
addition there were a dozen students who wrote relatively fluently, a
handful of whom had some talent: The most gifted of these was Dominique Lo
Bianco.
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