The Long Accomplishment Page 4
The museum that agreed to show the work is, like Yaddo itself, in Saratoga Springs, New York, namely the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, and once they agreed to hang the images from the Meredith S. Moody Residency, we very tentatively asked if they might consider showing some of my sister’s photos as well. In fact, initially, we thought about asking if they’d show exactly one. But what happened was that Laurel and I went to my mother’s condo in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and went poring through the several thousand prints and slides that remained of my sister’s photographic work after her death.
It was a sunny day in Pennsylvania, and my stepfather was not yet as ill as he later became, and there was a stillness to the way they lived, in a slowing down of events, an arrest of the contemporary. My mother’s house preserved, for example, a lot of my grandfather’s things. It was sort of a mausoleum of antique furniture, with especial attention to my grandfather’s professional stint in Japan in the twenties, and as such was both reverent about a time before I was born and painfully reflective. The moments that day were full of joy: Laurel and I sat on the porch and went through all the images, with a loupe, which is that little magnifying ring that photographers use to look at negatives and contact sheets. Laurel, because she’s a photographer herself, has a really tremendous eye for what’s interesting in a photograph, and she spent her whole youth looking through a loupe, and I have been looking over her shoulder a lot in this time of our being together, and I am now not totally uninformed. And we sat there for three or four hours, going through all the images. Certain ideas going back and forth between us, Hey, look at this! And, This one is really great too!
What came out of all this was not only a sense of my sister living again, such that I could feel her eye behind the lens, feel the implication of her, her choosing this moment to shoot this image, and then this moment, and this moment, but there was also a sense of a hidden body of work. A body of work that my sister had hidden from her family in plain sight. Though we looked at a great number of landscape images that my sister had attempted almost ceaselessly over the years, always with the recognition of the sunset exceeding its ability to be captured in two dimensions, there was a completely different tendency in my sister’s work, and it nearly leapt up off the contact sheets. My sister was really good at capturing social occasions, informal social occasions, among her friends and her family and off the cuff at weddings she photographed, and these social images brought out the best of her as a photographer. These images captured what she saw in people, hidden moments of complexity and comedy, unassuming moments, moments in which people exhibited the least artifice, the most character. We collected a hundred or more of these images and then cut them down to twenty, and sent the twenty to the Tang Museum.
The best of these images are striking and animated photographs: for one example, some kind of party functionary paused on a lane in the suburbs, on some kind of ATV, carrying a gigantic multicolored passel of helium balloons to an unknown party. The driver’s expression—he who resembles to some degree the novelist Richard Brautigan, which is to say, white-haired, droopy, with a mustache, and wearing the fashion item most contraindicated for middle-aged men: short pants—is beleaguered, full of ennui, as if the riot of color bobbing above him is somehow being extracted from his very being, such that the party’s joy is his loss.
And there was a whole sequence of images from a summer party in which a young boy, with his fossil of a grandmother just behind him, seems to be lamenting some kind of bloody nose, though the exact cause of his pained gesture (grabbing at his sinuses with both hands) has been hotly debated inside my family; there was a photograph of a streetwalker in Jersey that my sister was apparently very thrilled to get, but which is noteworthy for the benignity of the expression of the woman in question.
The further I got into this project, of trying to preserve my sister’s photographs, and thus the instant in which she took each photograph, the instant in which I could feel an implication of her behind the lens, the more I liked it, and I did this, gazed upon my sister’s photos, often to the exclusion of the aforementioned novel I was supposed to be writing. That the Tang Museum agreed to exhibit some of my sister’s images with the collection she had helped to inspire—of women photographers who had been to Yaddo—was some kind of bandage in the big structural wound of her passing away. And there wasn’t that much else that seemed so important. Writing a novel about a conventional hero in a conventional way seemed unimportant, not to mention impossible.
Meanwhile, in the intellectual or literary part of my life, which was part of my life I was desperately trying to fit in, in the period I’m describing, I did happen to be reading Dante’s Paradiso.
Was reading Dante somehow engendering the feeling I had at the time of a Manson-related curse? Because Dante is about the moral and ethical architecture of the world, in which all things are balanced? Was I (according to Dante) somehow due some bad luck, because I had had it so good, had so much, and had done so much that was reprehensible during the period when I had it so good? I had read Inferno several times, and I had read Purgatorio several times; Purgatorio opines that even if you only say “I’m sorry” with your last breath, you can still make it out of eternal persecution, by will and transformation, into heaven. But Paradiso is more blissful than this. Paradiso is all about light and geometry and love. I had been defeated by Paradiso throughout my adult life, and therefore I never got to see the beautiful last cantos, where Beatrice guides Dante up to the very highest circles of heaven, where God is perceived as pure light, and in a way it is an indication of how hard it was for me to understand love, and to see it as a motivation, that I had always quit reading before Paradiso. I identified, especially when young, with Inferno, and its depersonalized suffering, and then later I came to feel the beating heart of redemption in Purgatorio, but it was in the beginning of 2013 that I struggled up through the oscillations of light in Paradiso, scaled its impossible latitudes, where Dante falls again and again into the inexpressibility of what he’s seeing, namely the emanations of love.
That this—my blissful paging through Dante with friends—was happening at the same time as I was acquiring a postcard signed by Charles Manson and grinding through a divorce, is perhaps a fine example, or so it seems with a retrospective gaze, of the peaks and troughs that were about to come.
October
It was always a problem, for me, that in Walden Thoreau gave short shrift to autumn. All the preparation for growing, knowing beans, it’s all there in the spring section, and then there’s a lot about summer, too, the lengthening of shadows, the twittering sounds of the forest. Even the desolation of winter comes in for significant attention, but what about autumn? It’s the harvest season, after all, and for me there’s always a great surge of feeling in the idea of the harvest, the preparation, the celebration of fertility, the time after the labor of harvest. The harvest still has great symbolic value. Halloween is less about the costumes, and more about the idea that pumpkins are harvested at that time of year, and I personally find gourds meaningfully tragicomic and resonant as objects and images. The threat of frost makes all things sweeter. As a child, as a younger person, I would wait through August in a kind of aesthetic suspension, awaiting that first night that was a little bit cold, when the air was crisp and new, and the harvest moon crested over the horizon line like an indictment of frivolities. The autumn light was more cinematic, more perfect, when the haze of the summer blew off. The stars, the shooting stars, the jets on their way to Europe. All in the autumn night sky. You could have clarity in autumn; summer was for chumps and guzzlers and people on motor bikes wearing inadvisable sandals and cargo pants. Autumn was when things started to happen.
We were getting married in autumn.
That Laurel and I were getting married at all, that we were having a ceremony at all, was surprising in some ways. Because Laurel is fond of noting that as a child she used to have nightmares about marriage ceremonies. She didn’t want everyone
looking at her. And in my late twenties and thirties, it seemed like I was never with anyone romantically for five minutes when there wasn’t a discussion of marriage, after which, whether in mind or body, I began to flee the scene. Yet Laurel and I didn’t have any kind of prolonged thinking about when or where or how we were going to get married, except that it would take place after my divorce settlement was final. The inevitability of the marriage was a fact of the relationship, it was just a thing we were going to do. And this was genuinely new for me.
My first marriage ceremony was immense, in terms of specifics and logistical issues. It included multiple trips to evaluate possible venues, it included a meeting with a cake specialist, it included not one but two bands, it included a very expensive photographer, it included an abundance of visits to outfitters, for both the bride and groom, and so many fights about outfits to be worn that at least one friendship was ended over the selection of outfits, and it included arguments about who was coming and who wasn’t coming, and it included friends scheming to be invited, even though we were trying to keep it small. I needed a honeymoon to recover from the planning of the honeymoon. At one point, an executive decision about what kind of underwear I was going to wear was made for me, without my input. I disliked all of this. It was perhaps a measure of my insecurity about getting married in the first place that I was significantly unpleasant about the details of the marriage ceremony and didn’t like talking about it, and repeatedly tried to duck out of big-ticket issues, like where we were going to stay on the honeymoon, and who was paying for what. When all those wedding planners try to help you figure out your wedding (and I would have died before using a wedding planner, but it’s hard not to be pulled into their public dialogue about wedding planning when talking about these things), they never tell you that, in the end, it’s all about who pays for it, not about how you feel about ceremony. This is, in fact, how in a capitalist economy, people rate the success of their weddings, by how much is spent. It’s sort of like the Kwakiutl potlatches, where the combatants destroy their own property: that wedding is best in which the principals, or their families, are most fiscally ruined on the way to the union.
So for the second marriage ceremony I desired the opposite. I wanted everything to be organic and simple. And this was an approach to the problem that I shared with my wife-to-be.
The first decision we made was to have the ceremony at our house upstate. This was a fine decision for a number of reasons. For example, the space was free, it was outside of the city, it was relatively accessible, it was a beautiful spot. But more than all of these things, our house was a good idea, because we were getting married in autumn. In the Northeast.
From our house, the one at which we were about to marry, we could see the ridgeline of the Connecticut Berkshires (the Appalachian trail up there somewhere), and their craggy, postglacial granite outcroppings, and the density of oaks and maples as far as the eye could see; and in autumn, the ridgeline was a conflagration, and this valedictory with its heavy poignancy was just the place to marry. There are a couple of outdoor features to the house, including a patio off to one side, and we figured we would have the wedding on this patio.
The next decision was about keeping the wedding party to the absolute minimum. By inviting our families, especially because my family is not that small, we got up into the twenties, and then we invited just a few very close friends besides. In October, we got through these decisions intuitively, and very quickly. We had sort of tarried on a date, and decided, therefore, to do the actual service on November 9, and that gave us a little room to find a rug to put on the patio, and to scale up some music for the event. (We wanted my friend the singer and songwriter Jolie Holland to sing one song, and we had to find a way to get her east, and we had Tanya Donelly, another good friend, come down from Boston, and we had to square dates with her.) And we had to figure out a cake. In the end, we got my bandmate and friend Hannah Marcus to come up with a cake. She had been a confectionary expert as a young person.
I was teaching two courses at NYU that fall, an undergraduate workshop in creative writing and a writing-for-artists class in the MFA program in studio art. And Laurel was teaching at the School of Visual Arts. And my daughter was doing her pre-K year at a day care facility in Lower Manhattan. So we had our hands full, and didn’t want regular life and the marriage ceremony to crowd each other out.
That’s how we decided to have a little preliminary wedding at the City Clerk’s office in downtown Manhattan. And, I must say, I really wanted to get married there. I love that joint. I love the long lines of dizzy-in-love people who want to get it done now, however inadvisable the haste. I love that the City Clerk’s office is about all races and ethnicities, and, in 2013, all sexualities and gender expressions. Gay marriage in New York State had only been legal two years or so when we visited there, and it was a subject I had always felt very passionate about, owing to the fact that my cousin Jack Moody and his partner, David Smith, had not been able to marry legally during the thirty-six years they were together. When David died (in a bicycle accident in 2007), Jack had all kinds of difficulty simply inheriting from his husband’s estate. That the City Clerk’s office would be much taken up with establishing the marital rights of my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters in the period of our own nuptials felt like a powerful emblem for the civic approach to tying the knot.
As our witnesses, we chose two of our nearest and dearest friends, Amy Hempel (she’s the author of Reasons to Live, and Tumble Home, and other excellent books, and my colleague in many settings going back twenty years or so, also a close friend of Laurel’s) and Randy Polumbo (sculptor, installation artist, and, when I first met him in Providence, Rhode Island, during my student years, a wild man from the east side of town—we’d been friends more than thirty years), and they came with us downtown. It was a sunny, warm day in October, and the office was right near where my daughter was in day care (her mom worked in Federal Plaza), so we were on our way there anyhow. No matter how often one successfully transacts business with the federal, state, or local government, there is still that feeling that the business is about to be thwarted, that you don’t have the proper forms, that the proper forms do not exist, and even if they did, you could not have them. I was a little bit nervous. I always wear the same thing when I’m nervous: polka dots. Somewhere I saw a photo of Bob Dylan wearing polka dots, from the mid-sixties, and, upon purchasing my first polka-dotted shirt, from a western-wear store in Arizona, I made the polka dots my thing, in a frank effort to seize them from the-no-longer-freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Well, the polka dots and also the porkpie hat, which I have been wearing for fifteen years or so. I think my porkpie is sort of a variation on the “stingy brim,” or that is what I have been told by certain incredibly well-informed gentlemen in their sixties who have approached me on the street to talk to me about my hat. Okay, so really it’s a three-part outfit, for the moments of high anxiety, black jeans, polka-dotted shirt (white dots on a navy blue or black field), and porkpie hat. It’s not, really, that I aspire to being fashionable in any way, or that I imagine my outfit is somehow stylish, although when I was young I wanted to be stylish. No, it’s just that I like an outfit the semiotics of which I can rely on, and which I don’t have to think about very much. And which favors my rapidly aging physical appearance.
I wore this outfit. And Laurel wore a red-and-white striped vintage 1950s sailor outfit. She was, in those days, doing a lot of online dress shopping for the outdoor, upstate wedding of November 9, but for City Hall, she was just wearing the sailor outfit. I think Laurel used to show up at her crits in the photo department at Yale, when she was a grad student there, wearing vintage Girl Scout uniforms. A certain amount of vintage style is not at all out of the realm of possibility for her. Laurel wears metafictional outfits, but she never laughs about them for your benefit. You have to work the meanings out for yourself.
My recollection is that we didn’t have to wait long because we went early in
the day. Amy Hempel forgot her forms of identification, but this was no great crime, because we only needed one witness and Randy was able to sign on that line. He lives right near City Hall, and therefore he apparently rolled out of bed and brought his driver’s license, and was ready to serve. In the line to see the judge who would pronounce us wedded, there were, as I had supposed, a great number of gay couples, and it is perhaps no stereotype, but just the facts, that these guys were almost without exception exceedingly well turned out. To a degree that shamed us. We looked like the couple who had slept together after open studios in the Gowanus Canal area, and decided, still somewhat deranged by the events, that we should head to City Hall. None of these things were true, of course—our gear was more about constitutional, and (in my case) unrepentant, informality, a hatred of formality that borders on the obsessive, but there we were. Surrounded by gay couples and interracial couples like us (Laurel being Japanese American on her father’s side) and poorer couples, and younger couples, all of New York City, as a matter of fact. The demographic was not dissimilar to the demographic that uses New York City mass transit, but happier! Everyone there was bending the narrative of their life’s journey in this direction of love, of affirmation, on that morning, and we were with them, and it was hard not to feel some incredible group purpose, as if we were all in the baseball stadium with the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, and he was going to, in some explosion of nuptial simultaneity, pronounce us all married before God. I think the close quarters of multiple nuptial celebrants increases the volume of love, the kilos per cubic foot of air of love, in a room, geometrically rather than arithmetically, and the sense of purpose is therefore precisely infectious.