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  For LKN, HJM, TFNM, eilífu

  Acknowledgments

  I am most grateful to everyone at Henry Holt and Company for their generous and warm welcome of myself and my memoir. The entire Holt team has treated me with warmth and kindness, even as I was waiting around for the ending of my book, which took a while. I won’t forget their kindness. I would like especially to single out my editor, Barbara Jones, to whom I am much indebted here, as I have often been, for her wise counsel and her writerly instincts; likewise her excellent associate Ruby Rose Lee. Barbara and Ruby each helped me over many hurdles on the way to this book.

  Melanie Jackson and Matt Dissen at the Melanie Jackson Agency have also been instrumental in this work coming to fruition. Working with Melanie has been among the greatest honors of my writing life.

  Laurel, my wife, was a collaborator and a source of inspiration throughout this project. Laurel is shrewd, uncompromising, wise, and effortlessly original. I could not have written these pages without her. The same is true of Hazel Moody and Theo Moody, who have made me a better person and a better writer.

  Thanks, as well, to Jeffrey Wang for all that he has given Laurel and me, and to my cousin the Reverend Jack Moody, who has never failed to support my family, even when we were at our lowest ebb. Thanks also to my comrade of many decades Randy Polumbo, whose generosity is self-evident in these pages, as in my life, and special thanks, too, to my many writer friends who have made my up and down creative life possible: Amy Hempel, Susan Minot, Darcey Steinke, Adam Braver, Melora Wolff, Marc Woodworth, and of course thank you to Helen Schulman, writer, empath, ethicist, sister. Thank you to the Moodys and the Davises. And a special thanks to the Nakadate family—to my brothers-in-law, Nick and Nate, and to Neil Nakadate—all of whom could not have wanted another writer in the family. Mary Margaret Ivie Nakadate, we miss you every day.

  January–September 2013

  In order to have a second marriage you can believe in you may have to fail at your first marriage.

  I failed spectacularly at mine.

  It is not my place, here at the outset, if ever, to evaluate for you the way that my wife behaved in my first marriage, though because marriages are intricate, dynamic, complex relationships, you would not unreasonably infer that she played her part. This is in the nature of things. Failure is often as collaborative as success. Instead my job here is to discuss briefly what role I played in that failure, before going on to tell you about redemption in difficult times, redemption undeserved, redemption so unforeseeable as to appear to require a belief in grace.

  I am writing down these first lines because they are the beginning of the story, though I am still not inclined to cherish the particulars of my conduct where my first marriage is concerned. I did not rise to the occasion of matrimonial language, the beautiful, powerful vows that go with the enactment of marriage. I, who care about language, did not prize the language, but rather ignored it.

  I remember reading an interview with John Cheever in my early years as a student, in which Cheever says (in The Paris Review, I believe) that there are certain lies that everyone understands to be lies but that are still useful to civilization as moral ideas, compasses with which we might navigate the storms of our being. Among these, according to him, are the vows of marriage. I found this remark, made by a married person himself, painful to contemplate, but also somehow compellingly frank. My own parents, it seemed to me when younger, should not perhaps have been married, and they were wise to get out of the business of marriage while they were still in their thirties, waiting to remarry until they were certain they had settled down some. Theirs was not a marriage that indisputably reassured about the sturdiness of the institution, and that was what I knew from earliest childhood, the sadness, anger, grief, and isolation of a marriage that had endured beyond what was practicable. I love both of my parents, and I have often marveled in my adulthood at what a good job they did in remarriage. But I saw them express affection toward each other, while married, infrequently enough for it to be both surprising and hard to remember in any detail. Though one can presume, on the basis of their three children (my brother, my sister, and myself) that some kind of love took place at some point in the late fifties and early sixties, I knew little about it.

  This was one factor in the tremendous reluctance I had about marrying in my twenties and thirties—the ache of the history of my own parents and their separation. My parents divorced after thirteen years. Meanwhile, my mother’s mother, whose acute alcoholism was the end of her in her sixties, after multiple hospitalizations, was effectively bedridden in a sort of nineteenth-century-novel way during the later period in which her husband, my well-known grandfather, F. M. Flynn, helmed the New York Daily News. No one outside of the family knew of her suffering or her demise or of the barrenness of the marriage between them, at least in the later years of their union. Of my grandmother Flynn, I remember only that she had a nurse, and that she did the crossword puzzle assiduously each Sunday. We went to visit her some. But she (and my uncle, my mother’s brother) died in the mid-1960s. I never got to know either of them well.

  After his wife’s death, my grandfather Flynn never remarried.

  My father’s parents were similarly remote from each other (as I wrote some years back in a book called The Black Veil). They lived two floors apart, they kept to diurnal schedules that were very different (my grandfather went to bed at sunset, my grandmother stayed up till late), they had separate interests, they did not seem to communicate very much.

  Was it because of all this suffering, however unintentional, that I understood nothing of monogamy? That I never even tried very hard to understand monogamy? Family history is perhaps part of it.

  I can go back through my teens to romantic triangle after romantic triangle: the teenaged girl to whom I lost my virginity, at boarding school, who had also been involved with my roommate; a cherubic tenth grader I was seeing later in senior year who knew little about the sultry torch singer girl I was hooking up with; the long-term girlfriend in college who went on safari with her family to Kenya, whereupon I took up with a fellow intern at my summer job; my later girlfriend in college, who transferred to another school for a semester, which prompted an entire odyssey of extracurricular experiments with friends.

  Under no circumstance did it seem that monogamy was an impulse that I wanted to explore, and it was not that I didn’t love anyone with whom I was in a relationship at the time; more it seemed that I loved everyone, and could not bring myself to make a choice among them.

  My first wife was someone I met in an improbable internet-ish sort of way after a rather traumatic breakup with a prior lover who had the temerity to refuse to be monogamous with me (she was bisexual, and wanted to keep it that way). My first wife seemed earnest and totally available, and she lived in Chicago, which was nowhere near where I lived in Brooklyn, and right from the start it was more of the
same, for me, by which I mean both love and inconstancy, deceit and impulsiveness, failure at intimacy. I was often at the artists’ colonies, like Yaddo and MacDowell, and as often seemed to happen in those days, I could not but find that certain painter utterly charismatic, and I was only too happy to counsel that fellow writer about her own unhappy marriage, and so on. I aspired to do better, but I did not do better, and in this attenuated string of short-term indulgences and experiments, it seems now, there was little but selfishness and manipulation.

  And then something really awful happened.

  In November of 1995 (on All Souls’ Day, in fact, and almost exactly twenty years ago, as I write these lines, and from where I’m working in New England, I can only look on the riot of almost excessively beautiful autumnal color and think of this sequence of events, as if it’s an old school film loop of hardships), my sister was putting her children to bed one night when she had a seizure, and her heart stopped, and no one was able to revive her. Had I put down here the necessary pages of a biography of my sister (older than me by three years, and possessed of two children, ages four and six at the time of her death), the gregarious, funny, winning, beautiful, short-tempered, self-destructive, frequently drunken, incredibly loyal, heartbreakingly devoted mom who was my sister, you would have a better idea what a shock this was to me and my family (which, for the record, also included, at the time of my sister’s death, my just-married brother, Dwight, eighteen months younger than I, who would, with his wife, Colleen, go on to have three children, two of whom are now in college, and the third in high school). But suffice to say that at thirty-four I had never known the scourging of sudden loss. Of time and its depredations, I knew the turn of the seasons, and the getting older of the very old, and in that it seemed there was an order to life and death. My beautiful, outrageous sister, at age thirty-seven, should not have been subjected to this sudden turn of fate. And her kids, her wonderful funny kids (who are now my formidable and upstanding niece and nephew, fully grown), should not have had to suffer what they suffered through. The suffering should not have spooled out in front of them, piling up the complications and reverberations across the many years, in the way that it did.

  I had gone through a lot myself, in my twenties, again as I have written in the earlier memoir called The Black Veil. For example, I struggled with alcoholism and depression, but I had come through most of those problems. Of my early thirties I remember that I was feeling provisionally good about things. I had an occasional spring in my step. I was publishing my first books, and though I had lost a really great, rewarding publishing job, I had figured out a way to make enough money to survive, if inexpensively, and I was living by my wits, and I believed that things, to one degree or another, were going to get better. I believed that life was constituted in such a way that it improved.

  And then my sister died.

  The wreckage associated with this loss was immense. There was the splintering of family certainties that comes from having the most social, most family-oriented person in your family suddenly disappear. There was the total philosophical depletion that comes with prolonged grief. (I couldn’t do anything for a while. For example, I can recall spending several days, at one point, thinking about getting a new power strip for all the cords that led from my computer and printer, thinking that this might be one thing I could manage, and just doing nothing about it. For months. Just sort of sitting and idly thinking about the power strip, and then weeping about my sister, and thinking about the power strip some more. There seemed no meaningful thought I could have, there seemed no reason to do the next thing, so why not the power strip? I’m sure I ate and showered, but that was about the extent of things. Some months later I believe I finally purchased the power strip, as a kind of initial sign that minor improvement was possible. Perhaps at that time I also replaced a burned-out lightbulb. The simplest things, with sustained assault, were just barely possible. Sleep occurred sporadically, and was marred by gruesome thoughts. I managed to stay sober, which was imperative to getting through the loss, and I managed to check in with my family now and again, all of them wrecked, but by and large I did very little, for a long time.)

  When I began to come out of the acute phase of this loss, I noticed that some of the spiritual certainties that had accrued to me after sobering up and getting out of the psychiatric hospital in the late eighties, evaporated before me, as if they were water vapor boiled off by the convectionary action of calamity. The sense of order and rightness to a lifetime’s sequence of events collapsed. And as far as the moral certainty of the time, I no longer had any of it. On the contrary, I felt like the world was a Darwinist world, a consume-or-be-consumed world, a world of disappointment and searing loss and regret, and that there was no point in not pursuing some of the really overwhelming compulsions that my brain occasionally offered up.

  Off the rails I went. Whereas in the years before my sister died there had been some very occasional ethical thinking about the needs of others, some ethical thinking about the implications of respect and compassion, now recklessness swept over me like a category five hurricane. In the middle of these reckless years my first wife, who was not yet quite that, asked me to marry her, and I turned her down. Because why bother? I refused to have children, too, so there was no good reason for her to wait for me, but wait she did, while I was off on a fever dream, in some kind of compartmentalized, isolated world of compulsive behavior that only people who suffer with addictive illness can really understand well. I lied to her, I lied to my family, I lied to myself, I lied to my multiple lovers. Partially or wholly invented stories about where I was or whom I was with were so regular that I wouldn’t have even thought to use the word deceit. The stories never bore up under attention, on the rare occasions that I was worth attention. Every time I put down or trash-talked a certain kind of sexual behavior as damnably perverse, I found myself electing to pursue it, so that the field of activity got more and more profane, more and more dishonorable, so that all mornings had the features of a hangover, if without any of the actual alcohol. It is worth saying that I hated myself in many potent and baroque ways, and I told no one this, and in the milieu of literature and civic life, in more cases than not, people seemed to me to think I was a reasonably good guy.

  The only thing that operated as a leavening agent in all of this was the love of my sister’s kids, whom I saw as often as I was able in those days. They loved my first wife, still do, and we took them to the movies, and got them gifts when we could, and saw them in the summers a lot. When my total resistance to the domestic first began to yield to something like adult thinking, in my late thirties, it was because I loved these kids.

  In fact, I think I got married, therefore, because I came to see that children, through the prism of my sister’s children, were an illumination in the crabbed and half-lit space of narcissistic young-adulthood. My sister had the two, and eventually my brother had the three, and my going along on my way with only books to show for myself seemed like a kind of recoiling from what is productive and lasting in life. I remember an older friend saying to me once: Well, children are what you do with a life. It took me years to understand her words, and I had to hurt myself and others a great deal to get there.

  So I agreed to get married, which is not the same as enthusiastically embracing marriage, because in the end I wanted to have a child, but without any intention of not continuing on with all the compulsive activity on the side. One affair lasted for seven years, one lasted for five (they might have overlapped a bit), at one point there were at least three being conducted at the same time, maybe four if you count some occasional indiscretions with yet another party. I felt morally upright because I had never been to a prostitute or a massage parlor, but if that’s morally upright then there are alcoholics who are not alcoholics because they never drank rum or scotch.

  My wife and I quickly landed in couples therapy, maybe not more than a year or two after our wedding, and she, who had endured all of this, and ha
d known about much of it, suggested that the only way to go on was if we were both allowed to pursue the arrangement that I pursued with such zeal and irresponsibility aforethought, and though this seemed like a tolling of the funeral bell to me, not an act of liberation, I said yes, simply because I didn’t know how to stop. And then, while we were doing that, practicing what is called the open marriage, we were trying to get pregnant. Or she was trying to get pregnant. I was sort of trying to do what was expected of me.

  Somehow, it seemed, I had reproduced many of the features of the bad writerly marriages that I knew about from reading all the biographies, the writer husband who has to go away for a year to write his book, and who takes up with a younger, more innocent writer of his acquaintance, and uses this casually imbalanced relationship to rail against his own misery. I rationalized my conduct in many of the usual ways: It was good material, and I needed to feel passionately in order to write passionately. And so: I tried to have sex in a crowded café once (without being noticed), I went to a bar with trans sex workers, I allowed myself to be beaten, I had sex on the pay phone at a writers’ colony while around me novelists worked away on their opuses, I stashed willing partners in a vast portfolio of distant cities, I had electrifying correspondences, both through the mail and online, I waited patiently, I exploited the internet, I gathered in the willing slowly and quickly and sometimes indifferently. The motto, in a certain precinct of my divided self, was anything that moves.

  I should say, in this supercharged historical moment, that there was never a time, ever, in my life, when this behavior extended to anyone who didn’t explicitly want it. While I leave open the possibility that people may have thought they wanted to be the other half of my self-destructiveness and then didn’t feel so terribly good about it later (as I often did not myself), all of what I’m describing here was with people who had similar preoccupations. Indeed, the moment when compulsive sexual behavior is thrilling, the moment that you chase, forever falling away from it, like the waterfall from the ridgeline, is the moment when the other person says yes. I never wanted anyone who felt otherwise, and never wanted anyone who wasn’t of age, and never wanted anyone who didn’t think it was all a grand adventure of passion, taboo, secretiveness, and desperate longing, or a sudden powerful remediation of loneliness. Indeed, loneliness was an uppermost feeling for me in those days. Lonely in my marriage, lonely in my affairs, lonely in my person, lonely in a crowd, lonely with myself. The desire to be touched (even when, in the end, it often made me feel worse) was the thing that seemed like it was going to help, even if my intimacies were rarely intimate at all. To be perfectly explicit, that is, I never wanted to hurt anyone. And the way I conceptualize this now, from after the years I’m describing, is that often the relationships were ritualized in such a way as to cause me physical pain, or humiliation. That is, at least then, I inclined toward my own physical pain, and liked to have people inflict some of it upon me, and the same was true to some degree with humiliation. The person I wanted to hurt, therefore, occupied the same physical space as the narrator of these lines, was identical to him. While certain contemporary thinkers of human psychology may say that these particular paraphilias are healthy and just another lifestyle choice, in my case they are not and were not, they were a direct result of despair, grief, contempt for self, loneliness, and desperation. Hurting anyone else was a horrifying byproduct, something I tried to avoid, though in the context in which a lot of this conduct was taking place, there were ramifications after the fact, sometimes, very painful breakups, and people were miserable then. I understand this, and I have a long list of regrets.