The Long Accomplishment Read online

  At last, we were ushered into an inner sanctum, an ultimate waiting room, with one other couple, two men, one of whom, in my memory, was wearing a gold vest under his tux, made even of gold lamé, and he was all shimmery, and I remember telling these guys that they looked particularly spectacular, and their response was a little shy, and I wondered if, in that moment, in New York City, there were not self-evidently a lot of fellow travelers who rabidly, wholeheartedly supported the mission of gay persons who wanted to sign off on monogamy with the support of the legal apparatus (even as I also understand, as the writer Wayne Koestenbaum said to me once, that there is a legitimate argument against gay marriage that goes: Why should gay men want that?), or whether, simply, those guys were scarred from all the cruelties cast upon them by straight unexamined-privilege types over the years, though I personally never felt like those kind of straight people.

  But perhaps as I was thinking this there was a hush in the inner sanctum, as another happy couple emerged from the judge’s interior space, which I thought of as the inmost section of the temple in Jerusalem, or the innermost part of the castle in Kafka’s novel of the same name, to which one is never granted access, or to which access is granted, after which you must die. Nevertheless, it was now our turn.

  What must go through the minds of the justices of the peace who effect this great turn of events for couples every day? Do they come to think of it as just another job? Would they rather have some kind of televised judgeship in which they resolve the disputes of small-time claimants? Our justice, a woman in her late forties, with long dark hair, perhaps from Queens or Long Island, if I were to attempt to guess, had not, I do not think, completely managed to forestall that tendency with respect to repetitious tasks, the tendency in which we exercise the minimum of consciousness required for the performance thereof. Which is to say: she was almost in a good upbeat mood, but not quite. This did not matter! Laurel and I had to say some stuff, despite the excision of all the God language, that was quite familiar to anyone who has ever seen a romantic comedy. Laurel does not like to read in public, at all, and yet all she had to do was repeat some stuff that was read to her first, and this she managed to carry off. The witnesses witnessed. It was all over in a matter of two minutes (in fact, they boast online that it takes only two minutes! Two minutes to change your life!), and then we were ushered out, and the couple behind us was ushered in.

  I am always interested in the way that liminal moments in life can be so brief. Things can progress in the slowest of slow motion, for decades sometimes, and then change happens instantaneously, in just a minute or two. A friendship can fall apart, after hanging on in some asymmetric disarray for years, until you have a discussion about something really minor, your profound dislike of your friend’s driving habits, and then the smoke clears and the friendship is over (I remember in college losing a friend because we disagreed on the relevance of philosophy to the work of Samuel Beckett). Change is happening all around us, all the time, and the fashionable idea that people never really change, that they grind along in the same way, making the same mistakes, fails to take into account how mutable, how constantly is the landscape around us changing, the ponds drying up, the marshes spreading themselves out across the roads, the oceans swelling, the ice shelves shearing off. Nothing is what it is for very long, especially when you consider how abbreviated is our time. In one moment, Laurel and I were affianced, in the most offhanded way, just having agreed that it was an inevitable direction of the years we had already been together, and then, in the two minutes of the workflow of a New York City justice of the peace, who probably married thirty or forty couples that morning, we were in law united, unto our deaths.

  The other really odd feature of the City Clerk’s office, where all this takes place, is that there’s a photo backdrop room, right near where the ceremonies proceed. There the happy couple can have its photos taken before this backdrop, which many of you probably know. What is this cheeseball backdrop? I guess it’s City Hall, which you can’t otherwise stand in front of anymore, not since 9/11/2001, but as the City Clerk’s office is no longer in City Hall, but on Worth Street, the whole idea of the backdrop is strange, highly simulated. City Hall, in the backdrop, looks a little bit like a French municipal building of the Napoleonic period. You could imagine some kind of international trade being negotiated there involving large batches of cinnamon, sardines, and maybe some Kalamata olives. And thus why do people want their photo taken in front of this backdrop? Perhaps because it’s there.

  Laurel is a photographer of an exceedingly gifted kind, and she doesn’t mess around when it comes to photographs. On the contrary. She will take a photograph forty times, even if it’s a snapshot, to make sure it’s what she thinks it should be. I have often stood next to her and photographed the exact same material she is photographing, and have found that I do not see what she sees. And that’s a nice way of putting what I do by comparison. In fact, it’s all about seeing, and while I pride myself on being able to observe, as a novelist ought to be able to do, I do not, it turns out, see things as through a lens, which Laurel definitely can and does. Some things, in Laurel’s world, exist solely to be photographed, and have no other value. She is an especially aggressive collector of the image repertoire who is forever running out of room on her phone because of the tens of thousands of photographs, and she is forever therefore adding new hard drives to her collection of five or six of them that are measured in terabytes not gigabytes. The Napoleonic backdrop at the City Clerk’s office, therefore, was an opportunity to see if we could find something in this image-making exercise that other people wouldn’t be able to find. And so we spent some time there.

  Randy Polumbo, my close friend of multiple decades, is also no slouch as a photographer, and often carries around a banged-up Leica that is unprepossessing and astoundingly great at the same time. He took the photos of us in front of the backdrop, in which we tried to jump and hold hands while doing so, which is a photo we have delighted in taking in many, many places over the years, we were happy and we were performing happiness, and Amy Hempel was laughing in an unrestrained way, and when that jumping photo was eventually accomplished there was not much reason to hang around. Anyway, it was starting to fill up in the City Clerk’s office, and no one wants to be in a civic office building, even one as handsome as some of the New York City buildings are, for longer than necessary, because of the presence of concentrated institutional power.

  What we agreed on, therefore, was that we would go get cupcakes. I am not sure how Billy’s Bakery on Franklin Street landed on our radar, but it did. I think I had taken my daughter there. And therefore I already knew that in the morning Billy’s is great. There are tables, and you can kind of hang around for a while. There’s a red velvet cupcake available there, which I associate with the middle of the country, though Laurel says it’s not really red and it’s not really velvet. There’s cheesecake at Billy’s too. If, like me, you have a tendency to be addictive in any setting, and sugar is the least bad thing you are addicted to, you definitely know about Billy’s.

  We started west toward Franklin from Worth Street, and crossed Centre Street, and then right in front of what I believe is the New York City Department of Sanitation, we happened into the marauding path of a woman, possibly a citizen of Tribeca, pushing a perambulator with twins. Because we were living in Park Slope at the time, we were not unaccustomed to excess perambulator traffic, even traffic jams of the sidewalk engendered by perambulators. We were not unaccustomed to going into one of those toy stores on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope where there is scarcely room for two pedestrians of the adult variety to pass without frottage, but in which you find regularly that two perambulators, and their owner-operators, intent on occupying the narrow corridor of Barbies or Shopkins, are inevitably falling into dispute. We were not unaccustomed to perambulators blocking up the front doors of restaurants, and creating fire hazards and ideological conflict. Twins, and their double-wides, were slightly les
s common, but still part of life in our Brooklyn. What was this woman doing down by Sanitation and the New York City Marriage Bureau, as it’s officially called, with her double-wide? She seemed as though she probably lived in one of the condos over in Battery Park City, or maybe in some loft of Tribeca that had been converted into something occupiable according to the dictates of a top-flight decorator, or perhaps she was a model who was smart enough to get out of the business. In any event, the woman, whose twins I did not get a good look at, and her double-wide bore down on my newly minted wife with a relentlessness that almost seemed to be malicious, until, like a Corvette threading through a crowded intersection in the last instant before the red light, she gave Laurel a significant brush with the double-wide, one that would definitely leave a mark; the heedless mom ran over Laurel’s newly married foot, and then continued on. It was the perambulator equivalent of a rich person’s hit-and-run. Laurel winced, crumpled up, and leaned down to assess the damage, which involved a bruise, and bleeding and later a scab, and we watched the proud downtown mother and her pair of twins head farther north to do more damage. One of our number, I won’t say who, though it was someone who could use the epithet without risking being held in contempt in the court of women’s rights, yelled fucking bitch! And you could see that while the woman thus addressed heard the epithet, twitched briefly, she did not linger over it, did not turn around, and just went on with her careening toward Pilates-with-child-care.

  It would be wrong, of course, to impute extra helpings of meaning to the kind of inconsequential rudeness that happens every day in New York City, sometimes several times a day (and I am mindful of that proverb that says: If you meet three assholes in a day, the asshole is you), but, you know, we had been trying to get pregnant for many months by that point, without success, and on occasion, seeing the happy, fertile couples pirouetting around us, in Park Slope even more than anywhere else, was a bit like getting a boil lanced. Having the more successfully fertile mom try to mow down Laurel right after our marriage ceremony, was, it seemed, one brazen incident too many.

  We went for cupcakes, however, and we tried to shake it off. They were good cupcakes. If the heavy labor of the day, bureaucratic labor, was already done, the trip for high-calorie snacks seemed like some intermediate space between the giddy excitement of ceremony and the beginning of the accomplishment that is marriage. We lingered in Billy’s Bakery, I mean, until Randy had to go to work, and then until Amy Hempel had stuff to do. We lingered, as if trying to forestall the moment in which the marriage would really consist of the two of us.

  But then the moment came.

  In fact, Laurel was already pregnant that day, though we didn’t know it yet. It had been my birthday a few days before, and the thermometer that we had taken to using to try to hasten things along had indicated that there was a certain fertility-enhancing conjugal activity that we needed to undertake on my natal anniversary, and that activity should have been good and just on one’s birthday, but I had taken to hating the thermometer and its inhibition of spontaneity. It wasn’t cool, the thermometer, nor was it hot. It was like the intrusion of a medical professional into the bedroom. I believe this is a common feeling when the first stirrings of fertility planning result in fertility not going as planned.

  We did as we were told, and probably, in fact, that was the night that we became pregnant. Though we didn’t know it yet.

  And: Did I mention that we lived in a building right on Prospect Park West that was sort of the last middle-class building on Prospect Park West, whose board was heavily staffed up with schoolteachers and pro bono lawyers and nonprofit types, and which still had laundry in the basement and a single slow elevator and a doorman from Yemen who was only there in the evenings (the building wanted to save money)? We had landed there to be closer to my daughter, and Laurel, who was more an East Village or Williamsburg resident (or, as it turned out, right before we moved in together, the resident of a rent-controlled studio just above Gray’s Papaya on Eighth Street), had found the place, and we were all three—when my daughter was with us—crammed into an artificial two-bedroom that didn’t have enough sunlight.

  For a long while, in our building, we lived next door to a couple who had wisely, back in the day, purchased two apartments on the floor, and conjoined them, and who, besides playing jazz piano at length, seemed totally harmless, excepting for the massive amount of weed they consumed. This we knew because each of the very few closets we had in our apartment seemed to abut the nearer of their two apartments, seemed to vent from their nearer apartment, so that, on certain days, it was only necessary to try to find a different sweater to wear to get a stiff contact buzz from the jazz-playing couple.

  This, it seemed to me, was the moment of change in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. I remembered well a good friend of mine who moved in on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope (when I was living over on the edge of Brooklyn Heights) when it still had street prostitutes. He had quite a stretch there of giving in to his sex addiction with the desperate recent immigrants of Fifth Avenue, until he got himself some help. By the time we got to Park Slope, Fifth Avenue was where you could get Brooklyn Industries T-shirts, and four subtly different iterations of Thai cuisine, and extremely expensive frames for your Metropolitan Museum of Art posters. What that was going to give way to, finally, was real estate speculation by the Upper East Side and Tribeca crowds. The hedge fund managers and arbitrageurs were coming.

  The pot-smoking, jazz-playing couple saw the proverbial writing on the wall, and were moving out to Flatbush, where the two million dollars or so they were going to get for their apartment was going to go a long way. So, one day, if not the actual day of our marriage, then somewhere in the weeks near unto it, we got on the elevator in our building and shared the cab with a rather short, extremely trim southern lady in her later thirties or early forties, and her very tall Flemish or Belgian husband, who before they revealed that in fact they were the couple who had bought the apartment that vented into ours, who had paid the very significant asking price for an apartment made out of two apartments that overlooked Prospect Park in the most desirable elementary school district in Brooklyn, asked us what we thought of our neighbors. Laurel said, They’re great, but they smoke a lot of pot. To which I added, So if you’re moving in, keep the pot smoking down to a dull roar. Everyone had a good laugh! Ha! Keep the pot smoking down!

  To which the rather trim lady added, Oh, we won’t be smoking any pot at all. No worries.

  November

  We decided to order pizza from Four Brothers Pizzeria (Traditional Pizza with a Greek Twist!) for the wedding upstate. We decided on Four Brothers not because it is the only restaurant in the area that does not have golden arches, but because we really liked George, the guy who operates Four Brothers of Dover Plains, New York. It seems that upstate there are so many Four Brothers franchises that there are definitely more than four brothers. Does the next generation not have a full sixteen or seventeen brothers? Because that’s how many Four Brothers Pizzerias there seem to be. The Four Brothers franchise in Hillsdale, where my cousin Jack lives, has a lot of Richard Nixon paraphernalia in it. I believe Richard Nixon ate at this Four Brothers establishment, and earned the lasting respect and admiration of at least one of the four brothers. But what restaurant besides Four Brothers Pizzeria of Dover Plains could possibly suggest the local colors and local flavor of the greater Amenia area for our nuptial event? As regards our main course, George would hook us up.

  We hit up my cousin Jack Moody, retired Episcopal minister, to officiate, and we managed to get our musician friends, Jolie Holland and Tanya Donelly, to sing. Amy Hempel was going to read a poem by Jack Gilbert (from which the title of this memoir is taken).

  We had to fly in Laurel’s relatives from distant corners of the United States of America. Laurel’s mom, who was very frail in those days (and who would get even more frail), was going to stay with us, and her brother Nick and his new wife, Jen, were going to stay in a smal
l studio on the property, away from the main house. Laurel’s other brother, Nate, and his girlfriend and her son stayed down in the guest room in our basement, where my books are. My sister-in-law Colleen helped us prep for the party by doing our first-ever trip to Costco. We used one of those flatbed carts there, as though provisioning for an army, instead of the more conventionally enormous Costco shopping cart. It was like prepping for nuclear winter. And we loaded our flatbed with our doomsday amounts of finger food (hand snacks, as Laurel calls them), inoffensive varieties of crackers, and soft drinks. A few friends arrived early to help unpack all the goods, the crudités in sixty-serving flats. And there was no alcohol at all at our wedding—because one of the trothed had the ALDH2 heterozygote flushing reaction, and one of the trothed had GABA or one of the related alcoholism genes.

  Laurel’s high school friend Heather works in children’s literature now, but she used to be a high-end hair stylist. She was very good at it, and she volunteered to do Laurel’s hair, and her mother’s hair, as well. This was sort of a beautiful thing, as Laurel’s mother, in her illness, was not terribly talkative, though occasionally something wry, funny, and warm would outlast her silence. When I went up to the master bedroom of our house to get my shoes and jacket for the wedding, Heather and Laurel and Laurel’s mom were all in there, pursuing hairstyle perfection in low tones. I could see how much Mary Ivie was enjoying herself.

  When I think about Laurel’s mother now, I often think of this moment, her sitting on our bed, awaiting her turn with the stylist. Three of her five children got married in a span of about a year (the second marriages for both of Laurel’s brothers), and she went to all three weddings, and that was very nearly the last time she was able to travel. I think she wore the same reasonably fancy dress to all three ceremonies, a really nice dress of rose gold and dusty pink, dressy with a hint of the cloister. Laurel’s mother was in significant distress, it’s fair to say, but was also trying to live life and show up for her beloved children, despite her agony. Few people of my acquaintance have been as resolute and forthright about love as a life goal, especially not when facing the suffering she was facing. Mary Ivie wanted everyone to be loved, and to feel loved, and she would do her utmost, even in great psychic turmoil, to make sure this love was actualized, put into practice, among those around her. Therefore her participation in the wedding, her getting herself up in her wedding ceremony outfit, and having her hair styled just so, caused some kind of glow of love and honor to hover around Mary, no matter how much else was going on inside her at the same time. The glow was passed on to us.