When it came time to wrap things up and make a tidy ending with my wife, she invited me for a meeting. She’s a very polite person and a pleasant host.
“Can I get anything for you?” Meaning a coke or a coffee.
“If you have poison for me, I will drink it.” I said, and she looked at me like, “You’re such a strange little man.
My wife was a brilliant person, and she had a great education, but not so much that she had King Lear mostly memorized as I did.
“I know you do not love me, for your sisters have, as I do remember, done me wrong. You have some cause; they have not.”
I’m honestly glad she didn’t pick up on what I was saying. Casting myself as Lear and my wife as Cordelia on my part was cruel on many levels, to us both. I didn’t want to be cruel. The story was ending. I wanted it to end quietly.
Her first marriage left her feeling inadequate and questioning herself as a woman. I didn’t like that, so I became the subsequent husband. While that can sometimes be the happy ending everybody is hoping for, it’s often the next act in a five-act tragedy. I deserved what I got. I came to her, not because we worked well together, but because I thought I could help. Those are not the same thing.
I still think she didn’t deserve the blow to her confidence that the first marriage brought on, but thinking I could fix it without hurting myself was probably a healthy serving of hubris on my part.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt mutual love in a relationship. I never pursued it. I would spend time with a woman because her eyes interested me, and I enjoyed talking with her, but I only ever tried to elevate the connection if there was an opportunity to make a hero out of myself.
It feels good to be the hero. People say such lovely things about you, and you feel important, even though you were really only important for a few moments. Timing is a vital part of being a hero. You have to be there when the crisis peaks and then beat it back. Otherwise, you’re just a chump, what they call these days a “simp.”
The earliest lesson I learned from my family was that “a man serves.” Just that.
If a man has more financial or social power than the people around him, it’s because God wants him to use those things to serve. If a man has more physical strength than those around him, it’s because God wants him to serve and protect.
Samson was a great example. God made him strong. When he used that strength for the people, God favored him. When he used that strength for himself, God punished him. In the end, God restored his strength just long enough for Samson to enact God’s vengeance on the people’s enemy. The same is true in the Hercules story, although with Hercules, it sometimes gets confusing whether he’s being punished for his own hubris or his father’s.
I see, all the time, the difference between those who serve themselves and those who serve others, and sometimes it really does look like you should serve yourself first, but those stories usually end badly. What you should do is seek out a balance between serving yourself and serving the world, but I was never very good at that.
Lear cried out, “I am a man more sinned against than sinning!”
I don’t know if I’ll make that claim. A claim like that can make God decide to actually singe your white head, not just threaten to. I’ve sinned quite a lot and quite often. Most of my sins were sins of omission, mainly omitting self-care and choosing to tilt at windmills instead because it makes me feel more manly.
A lot of writers try to describe what manliness means. Hemingway, in particular, casts most of his library in stories about what makes a man, but he didn’t write about many happy men. Faulkner doesn’t write about any happy people at all. Eudora Welty, on the other hand, writes about men who not only deserve happiness but find it. I wonder what that says about the difference between when men sit down to write and when women sit down to write.
In the end, Cordelia dies before Lear. He enters, carrying her dead body and keening in pain. That wasn’t my wife’s fate. She married again and seems pretty happy. I think she earned it.
I can’t say that I made the wrong choices in life. I made the choices I was meant to make. There are moments when I arrived just in time to be a real hero and make a difference and then vanish into the woods when there was no more hero-ing to do. Not all men take the same path.
