The Long Accomplishment Read online

  At last, in the midst of all this, I remember attempting with my wife to fertilize the relevant egg in Rome, in an almost fraternal way, and then my wife was pregnant. When I told all of this to a despoiled young lover from the Southwest, who deserved a lot better than me, that my wife was pregnant, she told me that there was no one on earth as evil as I was, that I would in fact be the death of her (these were her very words), and that I would then have that on my conscience.

  My experience of the bliss of domestic life, the time of fatherhood, at first, was that there was no real place for a father in it. I suppose the traditional thinking holds that I should have felt duty toward my newborn daughter, but I didn’t feel duty, not at the outset. I felt like my work time was being taken away. But gradually I began to get some time with my daughter alone, and in having some time alone with her, with going through the process of changing diapers and taking her to church every Sunday, alone, which is something I did from her earliest years, it began to emerge that maybe what had been accomplished in my marriage was the making of this wonderful girl, this weird, funny, loving, perfect little kid, with an easy smile and lots of curiosity about the world, and maybe the marriage would not survive its having made it to the goal line of its purpose, but at least I had helped to bring about this.

  Of course, I had poisoned the marriage, long before, no matter what my wife had done or wanted to do with her own choices. I had adulterated the meaning of the vows, and had not much bothered about what they all meant.

  And: not terribly long after my daughter’s birth, I gave a reading at an ashram. Why give a reading at an ashram? One of the monks who ran the ashram was a poet, and he contacted me out of the blue and asked if I would read at his ashram. Because I always felt it was important to say yes to any question asked of me that had a spiritual cast to it, I said yes on this occasion (and you would reasonably inquire why I was so given to spiritual investigation when I was behaving so erratically and myopically, and my only response would be: it is the problem individuals who most need the spiritual life), though I expected the worst. The worst, at a literary event, means: a very small audience that doesn’t quite get what you are doing at all, an audience that looks at you with an expression (each and every one of them) of mild confusion, a feeling that is next-door over to boredom. Put it this way: I never walk through the door of a reading venue without that sinking feeling of the time in Washington, DC, when my own mother was one of only three people in the audience. And the ashram, on the day in question, and its audience, delivered as expected. They had just finished up meditating, I think, when I arrived, and there were only ten or so, two of whom I had known from my home birth class! (The home birth class that preceded my daughter’s birth in the bedroom of our one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment.) They were there, and I liked them, and so I did my reading, despite the expressions of confusion that were next-door over to boredom, and then I talked to a few people afterward, and one of these was a young woman who insisted she had met me before, though I had little recollection of this, and who was telling me a little bit about her work, she was a visual artist, and I couldn’t quite make out all of what she was telling me, because there was chatter around me, and because there were others who wanted to talk with me after the reading, like the couple from home birth class, and I was distracted. The young woman gave me an invitation to her show, her exhibition of photographs, at a gallery in Chelsea, and then she left.

  And then I turned over the card, and realized I knew a fair amount about her work. I had read about her work, read interviews, seen reproductions. What the hell was Laurel Nakadate doing at the ashram? On Lower Broadway?

  This was the beginning of a path through and out of the shame spiral of the previous years, and it would be great, for the narrative that follows, if I could tell you that it was a love-at-first-sight moment, or that I knew instantly that the visual artist who had been at the reading would somehow have a lifeline available for me, and would be ready and able to use it. But obviously it was more complicated than that. The exchange between us was no more than five minutes (and apparently we had met once four years before, though I can’t really remember it, and we were friends on Facebook) and it was hard to concentrate, but she was indisputably Laurel, she of the challenging and incendiary video art, and the most I can say is that one of the great rewards of being a little bit known in the writing and arts communities is that if you really want to know more about someone whose work you admire, you can find a way to make that happen. And I did want to know more about Nakadate’s work, about the emotional risk of it, about the intensity of it, and I really wanted to know how the smiling, wry, straightforward woman could also be the person who made that work. She was the Laurel Nakadate of the video work, that is, but also Laurel the person, and that was the part that became interesting before long.

  It wasn’t obvious, therefore, that the reading at the ashram was momentous, that there are mysterious principles involved in the daily rotation of our hunk of rock in the heavens, because life sort of went on in the way that it went on. I had thought, in those days, after the woman from the Southwest had told me how evil I was, that maybe the love of the greatest songs, or of the greatest love poems, was a thing that was mostly behind me now. With the advent of my daughter, I felt, in the first year of her life, like adulthood was more frequently about responsibility, and I had been exceedingly lucky in many ways, was able to write about whatever I wanted to write about, and had a country house, and a family who mostly cared about me, and what did it matter if marriage was not what I had wanted. At least there was a little child.

  I did, in fact, because it was permitted under the rules of my open marriage, get to know Laurel, the person, better, but in the platonic way. I went to see her show in Chelsea, we went for a walk, we talked quite a bit about her relationship, I watched the movie she was making and offered opinions about the use of music in it. She came to see my band play (I was in a sort of a postmodern folk band for eight or nine years, called the Wingdale Community Singers, wherein I wrote some lyrics, and sometimes some music, and sang and played a bit of guitar, along with a couple of like-minded friends) and she really liked my bandmate Hannah. At some point, nine or ten months after the ashram, we went to see Avatar together. What an innocent and strange thing to do, to see a movie neither of us was going to like. Maybe we went to ridicule it. Some three or four months after that, when it seemed like her boyfriend or partner really never was going to move back to New York City, it seemed as though it might be appropriate, not totally unwarranted, to admit that we had some feelings for each other. The growth of these feelings was along the platonic axis, but it also came to exceed the platonic axis. It was a feeling that exceeded its container.

  From a thematic standpoint, it is worth pointing out that my intense respect for Laurel was such that I tried to keep the out-of-control and somewhat mentally ill Rick Moody clear of her address and, contrary to my normal operating procedure, I tried to be useful and helpful to her and her life, which I was very interested in getting to know. I tried to be in love, instead of needing anything other than that. It was occasionally an uncomfortable fit, but one that always seem to have growth associated with it.

  The months went by and my daughter got a little bit older, and in this highly orderly, if melancholy, domesticity, this marriage giving out beneath its weight, my daughter thrived. There was no big fight with my wife, no long sequence of hard, long talks about how things were going at home. Instead, my wife and I went to visit her family for Thanksgiving, and one night we went out to dinner, left the toddler with her grandparents, and had a decent meal, despite the fact that we just didn’t seem to have that much to talk about anymore, probably mostly because of me. At one point my wife repaired to the bathroom for a moment, while we were awaiting the dessert course (it was pie, this restaurant had really good pie), and then came back out to the table and said: Do you think it’s possible that it’s just time for us to separate? I will say, to her credit, sh
e smiled as she said it, and was just calling the end what was already evidently the end, and it was more about accepting what was than trying to get the facts to be otherwise, and she was very adult about it. It was I who had hitherto felt like he had to try to hang on, who thought that was my job, when there was nothing much to hang onto, except that habit of growing away from someone you thought you once knew well.

  I had been sleeping on the couch for more than a year, and I had been staying alone in my country house several nights a week, partly to write, and partly because I like being alone better anyhow. And because, after about a year or so, I found that I did harbor feelings of love about the visual artist who’d been at the ashram. There was not necessarily a reason to believe this, really, because as I say I sort of thought I’d loved everyone, but by the same token I didn’t know if I could do better unless I worked hard and treated her with respect, and I didn’t have a chance to do so if I were still married.

  My wife and I needed to be separated six months, the lawyers said, to get a divorce, and so we needed to separate completely, after hiring the lawyers, which we did in the spring of 2012, and that was when the civilized, reasonable, adult, and progressive tone in our separation was replaced by force, manipulation, self-preservation at any cost, and endless bickering about money. When I engaged my lawyer, who was a specialist in collaborative divorce, she said that the average divorce in her practice took somewhere in the area of twenty-two weeks. By the end of 2012, we’d been at it over twenty-two weeks, and we had no end in sight.

  Laurel and I decided to get an apartment together, in Park Slope, and I sold my writing studio on the coast, and bought a house in Dutchess County, and Laurel and I began traveling back and forth between the two, Park Slope and eastern Dutchess County, trying to get a life together off the ground, while every couple of weeks I would go and meet with my first wife and the lawyers, and be so filled with disgust and hatred for mankind and his works that I sort of could not do anything else. The money part was monstrous and cruel and brought both of us nearer to ruin, and it did not favor the father of the child. I understood I would have to give up some stuff to leave. A lot of stuff, apparently. It was the hardest interpersonal negotiation I had ever had in my life. I had seen lawsuits, I had been fired from a job, I had broken up with some people before, in lasting and painful ways, but nothing was as hard as the legal process called divorce. Divorce was like agreeing to have all your skin peeled off electively, after which you walk around like that, like a guy with no skin, for all your neighbors and friends to see.

  Meanwhile, how does a spree of self-centeredness, moral fuzziness, and destructive sexual abandon come to an end? It can happen all at once, with an arrest for going to the prostitutes one too many times, or for trying to carry cocaine onto an airplane with a college student, or in a drunken car accident, and while I didn’t do any of these things during my first marriage, I did wear it down with studied casualness. Not because I had some systematic program of resistance in mind, but because I felt like I didn’t care, and couldn’t be bothered. Bit by bit, marriage became a position I thought I could no longer comfortably inhabit. The little humiliations, like running into people with whom I had behaved inappropriately, or waking up feeling ashamed, or simply thinking about being indisputably middle-aged and still behaving like I was in my early twenties, these all acted against the set of assumptions, the nihilism, that appeared to make possible my behavior. I assumed that marriage, and love, were tragic affairs, in which the essential indecency of humans would inevitably be revealed, and in which the animal instincts always outflanked the civilizing impulse. But over time, beginning with my daughter’s birth, and then through the long months of divorce, and into the sixth decade of my life, I started to feel like I wanted the things that I had never wanted before, like a sense of family. A family of my own design, in which I got to make decisions for myself. Another way of putting it is this: there’s an intense loneliness to addictive behavior, not only because the performance of addictive behavior requires so much deceit that you are required by it to be largely unknown by the people closest to you in your life, but also because the major part of your decision making is given over to the pursuit of supply (as some people in the recovery community put it), and there simply is not enough time for the small, rewarding interactions with the near and dear that allow one to feel witnessed, appreciated, loved. With the repetition, compulsion, and dishonor of infidelity, this loneliness is made worse. One’s actions entail loneliness, and then it’s the very loneliness that one attempts to repair with further repetitions of the compulsive activity. It can feel like some constant boomeranging of disaffection. At some point, I, the narrator of these pages, could take no more. Scoured clean of that time of my life, and beginning, perhaps at last, to accept the loss of my sister, and the loss of my marriage, I decided I wanted to do better. I wanted it for Laurel, and I wanted it for my child, and I wanted it even for myself, and in this way I began treatment for my sexual compulsion. I have to say it was a tremendous relief to admit complete defeat. As with my alcoholism, and my depression, awakening to a problem, and feeling the help rush in to fill the spot where secretiveness once lay, is to experience anew the joy of living. Sunlight really is a good disinfectant.

  The year 2013, then, began twelve months into my recovery, and in the last months of my divorce negotiation, and during the planning of our wedding, Laurel’s wedding with myself, and it is the first year of our marriage that this book intends to document. It intends to document October 2013 to November 2014, or roughly the length of a calendar year, in the way that Henry David Thoreau documented his year camped out next to a mud puddle on Emerson’s property, except that instead of documenting the natural world, what I want to document is a year in a second marriage, an extremely hard-won year in a marriage, and to try to show that in a year of incredible difficulty you can still nonetheless pursue the elusive goal of love, that shared purpose, no matter how old or in what state of mitigated attractiveness, if you are bent upon that lofty end.

  * * *

  LET ME SAY, however, that in spite of the aforementioned “joy of living,” if I were to pick an emblem, an objective correlative for the year 2013, it was a Charles Manson autograph.

  The story comes from the writing world, at least initially, and it starts like this. I knew this literary fellow who was doing some hard time. I think a number of writers knew him. Another writer told me that this guy, doing the hard time, wanted to write to me, and would I write back? I had no objection to writing back, because my own behavior had always made me sympathize with people given to the occasional horrible decision. I felt sympathy for the victims of crimes, of course, but I also felt great waves of compassion for the men and women who somehow seemed to do a poor job of living their own lives, and who then wound up in the penal system. I wrote back to the guy doing the hard time, and we wrote back and forth throughout the rest of his interval inside, and later when he was living as an ex-con in Ohio. I helped him name his dog. We talked about contemporary literature, of which he knew a lot. I think he knew Allen Ginsberg personally, and maybe William S. Burroughs. Often the guys living on the edge of the law know and admire the Beats, have you noticed?

  Some time later, when this guy, who insisted that he had not committed the crime for which he was interned (I have no reason to disbelieve him), was just another person on the margins of the literary world, I had occasion to review a certain book that I much esteemed. The book was Building Stories, by the graphic novelist Chris Ware. I ordered the book, and then I also got a free copy from the organ for which I was reviewing, and then suddenly I had two copies. This is not the strangest thing in my life, but it happened to coincide with my partner, Laurel, telling me about a certain conceptual art project named One Red Paperclip. I think the blogger who undertook this work is called Kyle MacDonald. And MacDonald, through a series of fourteen trades, managed to turn a single red paperclip into a farmhouse in Saskatchewan. I think probably MacD
onald was an unusually shrewd negotiator, and he had some very excellent allies in his project, or (and this part is undeniable) he got a lot of very good publicity for his project, and this enabled trades that anyone would admire or find exceedingly creative.