My wife didn't get along at all well with John. To her he was an unkempt friend of mine who did not support his wife and children at the minimum level—American midwestern middle class normal.
John was always thinking.
John was the one person I knew on earth who believed in figuring everything out—and for this I loved him. He was a true, real American gypsy, nomad, and itinerant who had moved his family from place to place to follow the intellectual scent. His wife, equally generous, carried along their two young children and was devoted to him.
Enlightenment—
Truth—
"What is truth?" asked jesting Pilate and would not stay for an answer.
In the beginning it meant nothing to me whatsoever. I had no truth to tell anyone. I didn't know any truth. What was truth? Platitudes—or an equation like E equals mc squared? What else could it be?
"What is truth?" I asked John.
"Oh, come on!" John scoffed. "You know what telling the truth means!"
I squirmed.
"Do you tell your wife the truth or not?" he demanded.
"No."
What was I supposed to do?
There was no truth; truth was irony, wit, intelligence, and art—cunning, exile, and silence like Joyce had said. I considered myself an honest person in so far as the word honest had any precise meaning to me whatsoever. I had never killed anyone nor tried to—though I had been involved in several abortions—and I had few if any hatreds and certainly no enduring ones. I had rarely struck another human being except in ignorance or in jest and even then I had caused no serious hurt or injury so far as I knew, and even those incidents possibly more severe than I had acknowledged to myself I had long ago come to regret and repudiate. I thought of myself as an innocent, to tell you the truth, and did not even take seriously my eleven infidelities in fourteen years of marriage nor the cannabis I had smoked for eight. I had tried lsd perhaps fifteen times, a novelty I had no interest in continuing. I loved my wife, in spite of my lies and the secrets I'd kept from her, and now finally we had come to a better understanding, I thought, about both our marriage and our future.
I confessed.
In 1973, at the conclusion of the last affair I would ever have, due to John's influence I told my wife about it, I confessed my years of infidelity, and I asked for my wife's forgiveness. I wanted to be a good husband, I told her, different from the man I had been for fourteen years.
I meant it.
I did.
Leigh had forgiven me.
I loved her.
I did.
Grateful for her reaction, glad, and inspired, I determined to do more. I was a flawed, sinning, funloving liar of quite ordinary proportions and I was about ready to settle down gradually and, I hoped, comfortably into the learned and vulgar routines of the academics and scholars with whom I had studied and worked and played for most of my life.
Things looked good.
Real good.
I was up on life.
High.
I was happy and pleased with myself and with what I had done and become and was becoming. I had no illusions about life. I had seen what it was all about. I was glad to have escaped the worst of it. I thanked my lucky stars that I had avoided Vietnam. That had been the fork in the road for the men of my generation. I was smart, I thought, and I was glad I was smart. I had lots of good grades, proof that I was intelligent, good credentials. Friends seemed to find me bright and fun to be around. They consulted me and asked for my advice on difficult personal predicaments in their own lives. I had no real problems. Nothing really serious was bothering me. It looked all downhill from here on out.
On went the war.
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