Angry Conversations with God

by Susan E. Isaacs

  “No, my life is in New York. I’m getting married; I’m leading a Bible study. I’ll let God take care of career stuff.” How I envied him! He embodied that idea: Want to be a successful actor? Go to church. He shot more commercials in a year than I had in my entire career.

  I found a subletter, packed my bags and my cat, and left. “No good-byes,” Jack said. “See you in April.”

  We put Mom’s house on the market. Rob came back. My siblings and I took turns watching her, cleaning, and packing her up. Mother’s language had improved, but she still couldn’t remember my name without being prompted. The window for us to be peers was over. I wished I’d spent more time getting to know her and less time trying to fix my father. Now she didn’t have the vocabulary to tell me who she really was.

  I still had high hopes for work. I enrolled in a solo showwriting workshop. I had so much to write about now: Dad, Mom, selling the house, maybe getting married. Maybe.

  If Jack and I worked out, we’d need to find a church he could tolerate. Gwen’s church in Malibu exploded because of the pastor’s Hindenburg ego. I didn’t know anyone at the Slacker church anymore. Gwen went Episcopal, but Jack’s mom was Episcopal and her priest drove a BMW, which Jack hated. I tried a church affiliated with the one in New York. The worship band wore hair gel; Jack wouldn’t like that. The pastor dropped phrases like unpack and engaging the culture. “Orthopraxy, dude,” he spewed. “It’s about right doing.” Ugh. Even my BS detector was too sharp for that.

  I tried another church that a friend called “organic and raw.” I was suspicious of a church that sounded like a juice bar, but I went. A greeter handed me a program and an article about them that ran in the newspaper. “They don’t sing hymns,” the reporter wrote. “[The pastor] said ‘European’ songs have no relevance in a multiethnic, multicultural urban church of revolutionaries in the heart of Los Angeles in the 21st century.”

  I wondered if they played worship salsa. I wondered if it was okay that I was white.

  The band came out and sang a chorus that ended every line with “What can I say?” Like, “I’m here today and what can I say? You made a way; what can I say? Turned night into day; what can I say? This song is so hey, what can I say?” I thought, I don’t know—what can you say? Why don’t you go home, figure it out, come back, and sing that. In the meantime, why don’t you play one of those theologically rich, musically complex hymns of the European imperialist white man?

  The pastor was great. He was intelligent. His sermon was organic and raw in an engaging the culture kind of way, especially for people under thirty. But I’d done this kind of church in my twenties. They always ended the same way: the pastor had an affair or bought an Escalade or his ego exploded like a dirigible, people were scarred, and the church disbanded. Or there was no scandal at all: the pastor was great and the church was fine…until the next organic and raw cuttingedge church came along and everyone jumped ship.

  At least, that’s what I was worrying over as I tried to imagine Jack at that church. Imagining Jack in any church or even in LA worried me. And based on our phone conversations, he was uneasy too. He had articles to write; he needed to visit his family in the Midwest; he needed to save some money.

  A few weeks before his scheduled arrival, he called.

  “I can’t move to LA,” Jack blurted out. “My life is here. I’m just starting to heal from what happened. I’m just starting to feel like myself again. I want to stay here.”

  “Okay.” I breathed. This was it.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  “We know what we need to say, Jack.”

  There was a pause. “I’ve never stayed friends with an ex.” Jack’s voice cracked.

  “I’ve never wanted to,” I replied.

  We said what we loved about each other. We promised to be friends. It was kind and loving and mature. It had been three years. And it was over.

  I went to Gwen’s house and cried. “I know it’s the right thing. If only it weren’t for that cardboard.…”

  She laughed. “Cardboard?”

  I told her about Pastor Norm’s cardboard. Bits and pieces of Jack still clung to me, and me to him.

  “But Susan, even if the relationship is over, he still loves you. That will never go away.”

  “Nuh-uh!” I blubbered. Then Gwen cried with me. Thank God for Gwens. When you go through a breakup, make sure you have a Gwen, not a Martha.

  For the first time in three years I was really alone. I was free to find a church and not worry about how Jack might like it. I was free to be God’s alone. And that’s really what my life was about, wasn’t it? The love story between God and me?

  My mother’s house sold a week after we put it on the market, which I expected. Then Wendy called: our landlords had sold the New York house, and we had to move out. That I hadn’t expected. God was closing the doors. But I still believed God would open another door. Or a window. Or maybe a vent.

  I got a catsitting gig in Venice in a decaying apartment with underground parking and windows that misaligned on their tracks. Cars came in and out of the garage at all hours, their tires banging against the rusty security gate. Maybe this was the door God was opening. So it was a crappy door. At least it wasn’t a sewer cover.

  But then agents didn’t call for four months. How come that door didn’t open? I’d booked four jobs the previous summer. What was wrong this time? What was wrong with me? Was this why I came back to LA? To catsit in crappy apartments? To wait on agents who weren’t calling? Bill hadn’t been so foolish as to race out to LA for pilot season. No, this wasn’t a door. This was a circus fun house. Everything felt wrong.

  And Jack: Hadn’t he been relaxed and upbeat? Hadn’t he wanted to try? Didn’t I push love away once again? Oh, God, I closed the wrong door! I e-mailed Jack to check in. I signed with, “Love always.” It took him four entire days to respond.

  “Susan,” his e-mail began (No Dear Susan, or Suzer, or even Hey. Just Susan, colon, paragraph, return).…

  I didn’t want you to hear this through the grapevine. I met someone. I was not looking. I never expected it to happen so soon. But it did. I wanted to tell you myself. Hope you’re well. Best, Jack.

  The fridge was buzzing. I could smell the cat box. The computer image burned a shadow on the back of my retina.

  No. No! He didn’t. He couldn’t! We were going to get married! Yes, the breakup was mutual. Yes, I felt peace. But wasn’t he supposed to grieve? For three years I put my faith in Jack’s commitment! Okay, yes, his obsessive, controlling commitment, but still! Jack said I was “The One,” and he replaced me? Inside the span of a menstrual cycle?!

  I e-mailed him immediately. Really stupid idea.

  You said I was “The One”! If you could replace me so quickly I must not have been that important!

  And his response:

  Susan (colon, paragraph, return) My love for you hasn’t gone; just the nature of it has changed. I realize now you weren’t “The One.” You were just my first big relationship. I never intended to hurt you. But we did break up and I’m free to date. Best, Jack.

  Best? Best what? “Best of luck putting your shattered life together”?

  “Some men don’t grieve,” Sophie said. “They just move on.”

  “No, Sophie. You have to grieve. Jack is in denial. Or he’s shallow. Or the relationship never meant anything to him!”

  “Then you’re in denial. You need to go to Al-Anon. That guy criticized your friends, your church, your butt. Your whole identity was wrapped up in what he thought of you.”

  I sobbed. “But he wanted to marry me!”

  “Be glad he didn’t!”

  Norm’s cardboard: what a wimpy analogy. Forget cardboard; he should have shown us a clip from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It wasn’t cardboard; it was my flesh and blood and all the memories that made up a shared life. My heart was gutted. How could Jack walk away clean?

  I stayed on Gwen’s couch for a week,
then Sophie’s; then I took another catsitting job. My cat got resentful of the moves. Finally I landed a summer housesitting gig in Bel Air. Now that I was here, I was ready to go on all those auditions my agents weren’t sending me on. I prayed a lot. “Lord, I don’t believe you brought me out here just to drop me. Jack can drop me, but you won’t.”

  A month prior, I had enrolled in a writing class, thinking I’d pen some breezy tale of Mom selling her house. Now all I could do was sit in the back and snivel until everyone else left. My writing teacher, Terrie, was so nurturing. “Keep writing, Susan. I know how painful this is, but you’ve got such great material.”

  “I don’t want great material. I want to be happy!”

  But I did what she said: I kept writing. I wrote down everything I remembered about Jack, from the night we met to the night he moved on. It felt like lancing an infection. Or more like slugging your arm to forget your migraine. But I wrote. I had to write. It was the only way to stay sane.

  Finally I heard from my agent, in a letter. It was a copy of a copy of a copy, gray and spotty and misfed at a thirtydegree angle.

  “Dear Client: We no longer can be representing you. [Hindi syntax?] Please collect your materials, but after ten days they will be disposed, but we will be closed foe the Memorial hollidays.“

  “Dear Sirs,” I replied. “I will collect my tapes befoe the holiday. May I be suggesting you invest in a copy of Microsoft Word? It will be having spell-check.” Boy, did I feel good sending that off. Then reality sank in: For the first time in twenty years I didn’t have an agent. I also didn’t have a boy-friend, a job, a home, or a reason.

  “Hey, Suze, I’m in LA!” It was Bill on the phone. We met for lunch.

  “Are you shooting a commercial?” I squealed.

  “No, a TV pilot. Isn’t that crazy?! Remember that short film you and I did? Well, it was played at Sundance. A TV producer saw it and flew me out to audition for his pilot. I just had my callback! I’m staying a few days until I hear.”

  “See? You trusted God, stayed in New York, and look what happened!”

  “That’s not all. The producer says he dated you in high school.” David Mankewicz?

  “David? It’s David’s show?!”

  “Isn’t that wild?” Bill laughed. Maybe my face was cracking, trying to hold that “so excited for you” smile, because he reached across the table to hold my hand. “I’m sorry about Jack. But, Susan, he was holding you back. I know things will change. God is faithful. You never know what’s going to happen next.”

  What happened next was that Bill booked the pilot and the pilot got picked up for a series. And I went to interview for a legal secretary job at a shoddy temp agency over a dry cleaner’s. A twentyfive-year-old bimbo with pencil-thin eyebrows scrutinized my résumé.

  “I see you worked as a legal secretary in New York. Did you do court filings?”

  “No, they used their paralegals for court filings.”

  “That’s because New York doesn’t allow secretaries to file,” she corrected me.

  “Oh. Then why did you ask me?”

  She sent me into a windowless room to take a typing test. I don’t know who writes copy for typing tests, but it spoke directly to me:

  The path to career success is a threestep process. First, identify your interests. Second, research which sectors are hiring your skill set. Third, make a graph. The point where your interests and skills intersect at the highest integer is the job that is right for you. And Susan, you are screwed. No one remembers you, and no one cares. You will be sitting at one of these pressboard desks for the rest of your life, trying to keep the dream alive. The dream is over. Get a job at the post office; they can’t fire you.

  I know: why didn’t I just get a job and a place and ride it out? But how could I get a job when I didn’t know what I was supposed to do anymore? And how could I get a place when I didn’t belong anywhere, or to anyone? And why temp for some law firm when I just wanted to jump out their conferenceroom window?

  Mom closed escrow. She had lived in the same house for nearly forty years. It was the one house I knew as home. And one day we packed her up and drove away. Now it was gone. I also had to vacate the house in Queens. It was loaded with memories of Jack; how could I spend two minutes in it? I had to go back to attend the King Baby weddings: Jeannie, Todd, Bill, and Cade. How could I spend two minutes with them, when I was so single and scorched?

  Jack sent me a card apologizing for “everything he’d ever done.” Maybe it was honest. Maybe it was meant to prevent any further e-mail protests. Or maybe it was an olive branch. “Maybe when you’re in New York we could get coffee,” Jack wrote.

  It wasn’t an olive branch. It was an open door!

  “Are you sure you want to have coffee with him?” Sophie asked.

  “Jack and I broke up over the phone. I need closure.”

  “Is that really what you want? Closure?”

  So maybe I hoped for an opener, not a closer.…

  And that is how I ended up on that grassy knoll in Central Park with Martha, staring at Jack at the pretzel cart, pretzeling his tongue down his new girlfriend’s throat. (If you skipped the intro, now would be a good time to go back and read. Done? Okay, see what you miss when you skip an intro?!)

  “I’m going down there,” I murmured. “Just to say hi.”

  Maybe it was good I was anorexic because Martha had no problem holding me down.

  I returned to the Queens house and took everything I owned and left it on the street for scavengers. I called Mark and got his voice mail. He was in the Hamptons.

  I called my sister, hacking out my story between sobs. “Everything is gone. Mom’s house. Dad. Jack. Career. God. Gone!”

  “But don’t you believe God is in all of this?”

  “Yes. And he’s torching my whole life!”

  “I know this is hard, Susan. But when I’m going through hard times I try to think of the people less fortunate. Like the Christians in Darfur who are being massacred just because they’re not Arab Muslims.”

  “That’s horrible. But I’m not in Darfur, I’m in America, and—”

  “Susan! Do you really think your life would be better if Mom stayed in that house and you lived with her? And do you really want to marry someone who’s going to hell?”

  “You sound like a James Dobson mix tape!” I hung up on her.

  I called Sophie. Sophie was a writer. She understood what it was like to suffer for your art. “Did you ever see Searching for Debra Winger?” Sophie asked. “A bunch of actresses way more successful than you ever were, and they can’t get arrested. The market has spoken. The market doesn’t want women over forty.”

  “Do you try to be rude or is it your subconscious?”

  “It’s not just you. The market doesn’t want women writers over forty like me either. The whole business is dysfunctional, Susan. It’s just another bad boyfriend who reels you in with flattery and promises, then neglects you and tells you you’re too fat or too old. And just when you’re ready to leave, he lures you in with a crumb. Get out before he destroys your spirit.”

  Get out to where? I was stuck in my empty apartment: no love and no career and a fancy dress that was now two sizes too big. And now I had to put on that fancy bag four times to go celebrate the marriages of my in-love and on-TV friends.

  The weddings were magnificent. I counted every bit of their magnificence: the number of flowers in the room, the number of breaths I took between bridesmaids filing by. I counted how many rows of hors d’oeuvres fit on a tray. I counted how many fast songs there were before a slow one. I listened to other people’s conversations, stories about anyone else’s life. No one asked for mine. It was written all over my face.

  Rudy looked shell-shocked.

  Susan: And that, Rudy, is how I ended up in your office four months ago, unable to function. I know I messed up. But I thought I was doing the right thing, coming back to LA, helping my mother, getting my professional lif
e back, putting Jesus before everything else. And God torched all of it. All at once.

  Rudy: What about what Sophie said, that it’s just a dysfunctional business?

  Susan: I wish someone in church had told me that long ago instead of prophesying that God would “open the doors that no man can close.” If it was going to end this badly, I wonder now why God ever opened the door in the first place.

  Rudy: At least you got to do it for a while.

  Susan: Yes. But it’s hard to watch my friends get to keep doing it. My high school David cast my New York Bill in his show! God was lining up the dominoes twenty years ago. And Central Park? What kind of cruelty motivated God to do that?

  What could God possibly say in response?

  God: Are you ever going to grow up?

  It was God the Father. Pure, old-school stern. Not snarky like I would have made him, and no kind Jesus to mitigate his severity. I feared this was the real God, and not my imagination.

  God: You sit back, “wait on God,” and blame me for the outcome.

  Susan: I wasn’t just sitting back. I was following what I thought you wanted me to do.

  God: As long as the results were favorable.

  Susan: Doesn’t the Bible say you will grant me the desires of my heart? And “may he grant you success”?

  God: Is that why you married me, Susan, so your plans could succeed?

  Susan: Should I have desired failure?

  God: I gave you success anyway. You drank it away. I rebuilt your life in New York, and you put Jack first. You broke up with him; and you blame me that it hurt. You always have an excuse.

  Susan: And you don’t? It wasn’t you who hurt me; it was just the church that represented you. Well, your representatives also taught me that you were involved. Tell me what your involvement was in Central Park. What kind of cruelty motivated you to do that?