Pop’s friends were invariably those on his bowling team. Or golf. Or the husbands of Mom’s friends. He was amiable and would get along with most anyone. One of his pals had always been controlling of his wife. After she died, he was wracked with guilt. She had wanted a computer when the devices were new. He flat out refused her. Not for any good reason. He just didn’t want her to have one. “If your mom had wanted a computer,” Pop said to me, retelling the story, “the first thing I would know about it would be to see it sitting here on this table.”
Maybe it’s Pop’s story that recall two movies for me, both ranking quite high. In both, the husband is initially presented as the seeming star. In both, the facade is little-by-little stripped away to reveal the frauds they are underneath. In both, it is the woman who propped them up and convinced them they were better than they were. In both, those women were taken for granted, sometimes with disdain. Why do I think of that truism made many times in Witness literature that putting another down is the same as boasting, even if it presents differently? In both cases, the relative positions shift the same.
‘About Schmidt’ was one of those films. Jack Nicholson played the husband, a big dog at his firm as the top insurance salesman, many awards to his credit. Everyone gladhands him, looks up to him. His retirement looms. He has purchased a gigantic RV in which he and his wife plan to roam the country thereafter. He dreads it. How will he ever be able to put up with the inane woman? Turns out he doesn’t have to. She dies unexpectedly. Perhaps it was a heart attack; at any rate, it was sudden.
Thereafter, all his assumptions begin to unravel. Turns out that no one really liked him at the workplace. They tolerated him. He had a certain knack for the job, and so they stoked his ego throughout his working life. His usefulness over, they were all glad to bury his memory and move on.
Then, it turned out that his wife, a seeming dingbat he treated with familiar contempt, had been seduced by his best friend at work. Only once. Fists flew briefly when he finds out, but in the end it dawns on him, ever so slowly, that ‘Duh! What did he expect?’ He had treated her as a non-entity. Someone paid her a little attention and it was too new an experience for her to resist.
Such is the thread of the movie, as Schmidt’s pure ordinariness is revealed. Aimless, he pilots the huge RV around all by himself to the destinations he dreaded to go with his wife, only now he misses her. Now, he is likewise consumed with guilt. ‘Was I really that bad of a husband?’ he asks of her, atop the parked RV, looking up at the stars. He asks her forgiveness. He takes a falling star as a sign that forgiveness has been granted. It had been granted throughout his life. Now, at long last, a wiser man, it was again granted him via meteorite.
The theme pops up in many films. It as so in ‘One True Thing,’ with the added ingredient of a daughter who initially idolizes college professor father, despises her mother, but by degrees comes to think she has had it entirely backwards. He would agree. As she deteriorates with terminal cancer, he despairs and repents. She has been the “one true thing” of his life, he realizes too late. He, the revered professor, always in demand, who may even have had a fling or two with some undergrads (roundly condemned today but it was a thing back then), comes to appreciate that he has really just been an empty bag of wind. Like Schmidt, he becomes full of remorse for how he took her for granted.
Any student of the Bible knows there are four Greek words for love and that ‘agape’ is the highest one, but it is the one not every marriage comes around to, and some do it too late. Agape is the principled form of love, the one applied to how God loves his people. It is a love that attaches itself to its object and does not let go until it has achieved its aim. Somewhere along the line, marriage has to incorporate this sort of love if it is to weather the decades. It can’t be self-centered. Unlike how God loves his people and stays the course until they come around, marriage incorporates the added ingredient of coming around oneself. It carries the added ingredient of molding two persons, not just one.
Eventually, Pop’s bowling mate overcame his guilt and grief. He started crooning about this beautiful woman he had recently met and aimed to marry. “How beautiful can she be?” Pop mused. “She’s seventy-something years old.” All very fine, I guess, and much better than the Rod Stewart joke I recently heard. A beautiful and touching experience had happened to him just recently, the jokester related. He was there at the hospital to witness the birth of his next wife.
****** The bookstore