The first invitation to speak came from the Michigan Dental Association. They wanted George to talk about dealing with patients who found going to the dentist to be an “unpleasant experience.” Michigan Public Radio had him on for half an hour: the response was so positive that the next time they asked him to come on the show for a full hour and take phone calls from their listeners. He started appearing on the morning show monthly. He began receiving a significant amount of fan mail from all over the country.
Scott Simon from Weekend Edition at NPR featured him on a segment. The dentists from Ohio came calling, and Wisconsin, and as far south as Atlanta. When the Ontario (Canada) Dental Association asked him to keynote their annual meeting, George felt himself on the verge of something big; but when he was asked to speak at the annual meeting of the Estonian Dental Association (Eesti Hambaarstide Liit), he knew his life was changed for good. And so did Lizzie.
*?More About Estonia?*
They had a wonderful time in Estonia. The dentists drove them around the country, from the Russian-speaking Narva, where the women in their babushkas looked like George imagined his great-grandmothers must have, to Kuressaare, where Lizzie dozed off in the midst of a massage. But on their last night in Tallinn, Lizzie had trouble falling asleep. Rather than wake up George, she got out of bed quietly and put on the thick towel-y bathrobe the hotel furnished for guests, rummaged through her purse for a notebook and pen, then took her pillow and got into the waterless bathtub. She listened to the voices in her head—they were quieter tonight, perhaps because they were transmitting from far away—and thought about Jack’s absence from her life. She thought about how much fun she and George had when they were traveling together. Finally, she wrote a poem:
Tallinn
In this fall-away-moment, between
(ago) that fall-away-moment and
(then) that fall-away-moment, you lie, cocooned
under a symphony of ivory linen.
The cold has invaded my heart.
You are asleep
in room 205
Hotell St. Petersbourg
Rataskaevu 7,
Old Town,
10123 Tallinn,
Estonia,
The Baltics,
Europe, the Western Hemisphere, the world, the solar system.
And I am writing this—so as not to disturb—
in the darkness
of room 205
in this one fall-away-moment between ago and then.
When she finished writing she was very tempted to wake George up, give him the poem, tell him about Jack, about the Great Game, about the voices, about everything that kept her from loving him the way she felt she should. She got back into bed and scrunched as close as she could to George to absorb his warmth and finally fell asleep.
*?George’s Secret?*
Lizzie read every newspaper and magazine story about George avidly and with great pleasure. What amazed her was that every article, every interview showed the real George, the George she was married to. She knew—from the personal experience of her own lying and devious heart, if from nothing else—that most people have a private self that’s often deeply at odds with their public persona. But with George there was no persona. The real George was kind, good-natured, and evidently very concerned about the unnecessary suffering of the peoples of the world. Probably he would have eventually achieved sainthood, if the Jewish religion had saints. Certainly in the tiny world that constituted George and Lizzie’s marriage, George was almost endlessly patient in putting up with Lizzie’s crankiness, her emotional distance from him, and her constant pessimism.
For in George’s world there were no tragedies: rained-out picnics, famine in China, lost library books, monsoons in Bali, divorce, children drinking at ten, mainlining heroin at twelve, and dead at fifteen: of course these events occurred regularly, but George refused to see them as tragedies. In his world there were no irretrievable bad choices or wrong turns. Each one was, instead, an Opportunity for Growth, which would come if you were able to respond skillfully to events as they occurred.
George understood early in their marriage that his life with Lizzie was not going to be easy, despite being desperately in love with her. He thought she was smart and beautiful and would have loved to possess the dazzlingly agile mind she had, which was able to perform backflips and front flips with ease. He was eternally grateful for Lizzie’s place in his life and for his place in hers, although he was never quite sure what that place was, or how important he was to her, or how seriously she took his feelings. He knew, for example, that she didn’t consider herself either beautiful or brilliant. On the other hand, so what if their life together didn’t come even close to perfect? Really, what marriage is? Bring on the difficulties, George often felt, because Lizzie is his own personal Opportunity for Growth.
Lizzie was the catalyst who brought his inchoate feelings about tragedy and sorrow into focus and clarity. He believed he owed his success entirely to her, to the depth and scope of her unique unhappiness and self-hatred. Given the profundity of Lizzie’s feelings, it made total sense that much of their marriage was difficult. George would give anything at all, including every bit of his fame and certainly the money he’d earned from that success, to make Lizzie happy. Where did all her sadness come from? She never told him. George was incapable of violence of any sort, but sometimes he had this fantasy of shaking Lizzie so hard and for so long that she’d be forced to tell him what was making her so damn miserable so damn much of the time.
Not surprisingly, Lizzie and George had a huge disagreement about suffering. To George, it was a valuable stimulus to emotional and spiritual growth; to Lizzie, it was merely suffering. Suffering was something she knew well. It went a long way (too long, George said, frequently) in defining Lizzie’s very existence, and yet it always felt alien to her, as though she had an extra hand, or an eye in the back of her head. She knew that extra appendage should be removed because then she’d be less of a freak, but it felt like such an integral part of her that to stop suffering would be like getting rid of something necessary to her being, perhaps the purest, most honest, most important part. Despair made her a whole person. And, of course, it gave George his life’s mission.
Here was a typical evening at home in Ann Arbor with Lizzie and George: they’d be sitting next to each other on the couch, shoulders touching, watching the news, Lizzie reading and drinking tea, George eating a bowl of low-fat ice cream, when Lizzie would put down her book and say, perhaps apropos of some news story, “Listen, George, I know that pain is not gain, no matter what you say. I know it’s your philosophy, but you will never convince me that the lousy things that happen in this awful world wouldn’t be so terrible if we thought about them differently. Maybe you’ve convinced a lot of idiotic people looking for answers, but you haven’t convinced me.”