The Long Accomplishment Read online

  There were a lot of photographers, and at some point during the ceremony, Gregory Crewdson snapped on his iPhone an extraordinary image of the light from between the clouds as it shone down, before it vanished altogether. It was not your average iPhone photo. He entrapped the brief enlightenment of the sun shining down between clouds.

  Tim Davis, Laurel’s classmate from the Yale photo department, had us all stand on the lawn, and took a photo from up on the deck, but then later broke the bad news to us that the shutter on his camera wasn’t functioning properly. Indeed, for all the photographers present, we had a hard time getting the perfect photo, if such a perfect photo exists. There was no professional wedding photographer, that is, a photographer whose specific job it was to photograph us, and that was fine with me. But we presumed because there were so many photographers present that we would somehow have perfect wedding photographs, by which I suppose we meant photographs that looked exactly how we imagined they’d look. As a practical matter, they saw us differently from our preconceptions. While Laurel prizes photographic excellence, my novelistic reply to the problem of the poorly executed memento photograph is simply to want to consign the whole thing to memory, and to be okay with the possibility that memory will be full of holes, and will itself fictionalize and streamline, and make shapely what is not shapely at all.

  George from Four Brothers (a touch of Greek!) came with the pizzas, and from there on out, it’s all a blur, excepting that I remember hearing my stepfather say that he was not Rick at one point, and I remember seeing my mother talking to Laurel’s dad, Neil Nakadate, the just-retired American literature professor from Iowa State University, and I remember seeing a whole brace of children in Laurel’s office crammed in around an iPad watching Ice Age, or one of those animated features from the same period, each of them craning to try to see around some body part of another.

  We were married.

  As I said, the mostly concealed fact was that Laurel was pregnant. It was an excellent secret to be undertaking the long accomplishment with an aura of fertility, thinking about what the future might bring, and thinking that the process finally seemed to have been bent in our direction. It was in this glow that we ate a lot of a leftover pizza in the evening (I remember Laurel’s brother Nick doing an amazing job of foiling up an astounding number of pieces of leftover pizza, and some leftover apple pie, too, which we ate for months), setting aside what little ceremony we had bothered to observe.

  The next day people scattered out of the Northeast on their four winds. And we embarked on our future. We had no honeymoon planned, because we had sort of had one on the Aran Islands of Ireland at the end of summer (on assignment for an in-flight magazine), and because we had work we had to do. This seems a mistake to me now. I think the tradition of making a sort of carnival of those first weeks after your marriage is a great tradition. I like tradition, in fact, which to me just means that you can look at things that happen only rarely but in a ritualized way and see the outline of broader implications, narratives of significance. We didn’t have time for tradition, however, and I had to do an event in San Francisco that week. A friend had invited me to travel all the way there, and paid for my plane ticket, in order for me to give a lecture about the time, a few years before, when I was a judge for the National Book Award (the five finalists for fiction were all women, and the status quo of that era didn’t like that, and an uproar ensued). Without fear of contradiction, I can observe that I have said all I need to say on that subject, and certainly did not need to say it in public to a cohort of MFA candidates.

  But there are rules of literary ethics that are tailored for cases like this, and my understanding is that statute number one of literary ethics says: Shut the fuck up and do your job. Whenever I have one of those little glandular convulsions in which such and such a writer doesn’t sufficiently appreciate my work, or such and such a department chair doesn’t value my contribution to the department where I’m teaching, or the review of my novel was only 1,100 words in the relevant newspaper, or that former student of mine can fill a room at a reading, and is doing much better than I am doing, whenever I think these things, whether because of meager caloric intake that morning, or because of lack of sleep, I simply utter to myself this statute number one of literary ethics, which says: Shut the fuck up and do your job. In fact, this is almost certainly a handy little rule for people from all walks of life.

  We did not want to appear ungrateful, in the immediate aftermath of our wedding, for free tickets to San Francisco, and if that meant that I was supposed to talk about the National Book Award, then that was exactly what I was going to do. Laurel was expressing some trepidation about flying while pregnant, but because my first wife had very quickly become pregnant, I was constructed of a blissful and ignorant notion that it would all definitely work out, and don’t panic, that awful stuff happens to other people, unfortunates, and so we got on the plane, and flew to San Francisco, a town I once briefly lived in (1984), and we took a taxi (that beautiful taxi ride alongside the bay) to our hotel in Nob Hill. I do not remember the name of the hotel, but rather I remember that the elevators were blue inside, and reflective, and that it was a boutique hotel, with a lobby the size of an office cubicle, and employees who doubled as model/actresses.

  We did some rather routine San Francisco stuff, like we ate at our friend Owen Ashworth’s favorite Mexican restaurant in the Mission, and we had tea with Abe Burickson, of Odyssey Works (there’s more to say about him later), and we had dinner with Laurel’s friend John, who edited that strange and very satisfying periodical entitled The Thing, a periodical that was also an object. John lived way out in some portion of San Francisco that I think was uninhabited at the time I lived there, and he was so far from our hotel that he had to get an Uber vehicle to come for us, and indeed this was the first and last time I ever rode in an Uber car. It seemed so easy, and I had not taken the time to consider the implications of a taxi-driving livelihood, the socioeconomics of driving a cab, that were being slain by our decision to climb with abandon into the gig economy.

  It would have been a perfectly acceptable business trip, of the kind I used to undertake regularly, to a city I still love, but then there would be no point in including this scene in this book. Actually, the trip was an indication that something awful was about to happen.

  The something awful, specifically, was that Laurel felt, with increasing urgency while we were in San Francisco, that her pregnancy had changed. She could feel that something was wrong, and that sent us immediately, upon return, into the jungle of medical options for expectant mothers. As you may know, getting an OB-GYN to supervise your pregnancy is in New York City a blood sport. There must be women who call the OB-GYN the second they have a positive test. They must have the clinics on speed dial, hanging up only if the test is inconclusive. They call and get put on hold, and stay on hold for a month if necessary, awaiting the positive outcome. As a result of this fierce competition, and our own resistance to making a fuss, Laurel and I ended up (during this pre- and postnuptial pregnancy) with a practice on the Upper West Side, about an hour from Park Slope by subway, in the care of a doctor who seemed willing to take just about anyone. We had an intake meeting with this MD and she congratulated us, and her congratulations seemed genuine enough that day. But she then attempted to locate the baby’s heartbeat and failed to do so, and told us to come back in two weeks.

  Come back in two weeks? How do doctors expect people to live through weeks of this kind? Maybe if she had agreed to freeze Laurel for two weeks, cryogenically freeze Laurel, in a lozenge-shaped tube, we could have gotten through that period without incident, but considering that Laurel had already felt, in San Francisco, like there was something wrong, this fortnight was bound to be interminable and marked by paroxysms of worry. This gear marked anxiety is not unknown in the interior workings of Laurel, the gear that indicates that there is the potential for something going wrong, and you had best prepare. At the same time it’s possible t
hat she is often right about things being wrong, and at least there is consolation in rightness, and preparation correctly undertaken. In the same way that Laurel’s mother had the penetrating gaze, the deeply soulful gaze, there is in Laurel conviction about disaster preparation. Betting against her was a good way to make life more difficult, and: she is sometimes exactly right. So when Laurel said there was something wrong, despite the affable MD telling us that no heartbeat was nothing to be concerned about yet, you knew that Laurel was genuinely suffering. Not a lot of sleep was had that week. After the appointment, which took place as soon as we arrived back from San Francisco, we had a listless walk through a nearby Whole Foods, where we spotted the mentally ill actress featured in the video work of a student whom both Laurel and I had taught at the Yale School of Art. She was sitting at a table talking to herself. It looked bad. And somehow the grimness of the moment seemed emblematic.

  We went back to the OB to have another ultrasound the following week, during which appointment we were fobbed off on a younger medical professional, a midwife, someone who might have lived in our neighborhood and maybe taken shifts at the Park Slope Food Coop, by which I mean that she seemed good-natured, approachable, and weirdly nonengaged in a way that people seemed to be in Park Slope sometimes, as if they can only become animated in order to tell you about the dangers of additives in your shampoo.

  The young midwife, sandy-haired and fit in a wholesome, Vermont sort of way, applied the gel to Laurel’s stomach, and whipped out the ultrasound wand, and there was a long meditative silence, during which Laurel, fearing for the worst, went all the way into that worst possible place, as I held her hand, vibrating with worry that she would not, in her dignity and self-respect, display for strangers, and our negative projection became a spiritual presence in the room. What can I say about this turn of events, but that I wanted it badly to be otherwise, and I had given up preparing for the worst, though it was second nature to me, because someone on the team had to be positive, and I was determined, at least, to play the role if only because no one else could right then. The silence was like one of those appalling intervals of dead air on the radio, in which you can tell that thousands of dollars of revenue are failing to be generated, or the silence on a telephone call after a calamity has been announced, and the recipients of the news are scrolling through the other possible outcomes, hoping that any one of them will be the outcome they can select.

  In this case, the Park Slope midwife ceased from rolling around the wand for a second and said the words that I wish I could forget, but have so far not been able to: “Sorry, guys, I’m just not seeing what I need to see.”

  Let’s give her the benefit of the doubt and suggest that heartbreaking reproductive loss was her daily fare, and she just needed a quick way to get the news across, before she, like the would-be parents in the room, could dissolve into a puddle. Let’s credit her in this way. Because the only other interpretation, which I have certainly entertained at various points, is that it’s really possible on occasion for medical professionals to lose all semblance of human compassion. After uttering these words, she sent us upstairs for another ultrasound with an enhanced device, and we waited around for a long time with a lot of other expectant mothers, and then at last were seen by an ultrasound tech with a brusque Eastern European style. She definitely, as a mere technician, was going to protect herself from the rollout of bad news, and told us that she was simply going to send the results back downstairs, where our doctor would interpret the results for us. More silence, more wanding, and then I watched as she typed, laboriously, the words “No fetal heartbeat” onto her screen, ultimately shortened to NFH, without at any point telling us what she was doing, as though I were incapable of deciphering the medical jargon.

  Many times, now, I have watched Laurel go through moments of horrendous loss, and sort of seal off into a place where she can protect herself. It manifests as great impatience and irritation at first. She does not wish to display her vulnerability in these assaults. Who can blame her? I attempt to love her through the irritation, because I know the vulnerability that is just under the surface there. When we arrived back at our MD’s office, where the results were going to be “interpreted” for us—the interpretation of the words “no fetal heartbeat”—we were, for some reason, told we would have to get on the back of the line of people who all had legitimate appointments for the afternoon, and an hour went past, and then most of a second hour went past, and the both of us, in that down-at-the-heels and threadbare office, began to get really irate. It is true, in my case, that I become visibly, irrationally angry in a prolonged way no more often than once every eight or ten years, and rarely raise my voice, but finally it became too much even for me, and I said very loudly to the women at the console in the office: “You are not going to make this woman with the dead fetus in her wait another hour so that you can tell us what we already know. So you had better let us see the doctor right now.”

  This sort of approach doesn’t work often, and I tend to be horrified by the people who regularly employ it, but it did work this time, and we were very quickly in the doctor’s office, who was giving us the choice of a D&C or a prescription. That is, we went from the possibility of having a baby, and all the symptoms of pregnancy, to going through the horror of remediating a “missed miscarriage,” removing the baby, in the space of a week or less. We couldn’t decide which approach was less appalling, but accepted the chemical prescription simply because the prescription and its effects could start immediately. I think they wanted us to wait a couple of days for the D&C. Laurel had the facts about misoprostol at hand, namely that it was (and is) a nasty bit of business, and all I could think about were all the women who took it first for stomach ulcers, and then found themselves spontaneously experiencing pregnancy loss.

  We filled the prescription, and then stopped at the heartbreaking Columbus Circle Whole Foods again, before we decided what to do next, the bleeding and stomach cramping, and all-around pain and suffering, which required not one but two applications of the fiendish misoprostol, these replacing the easy first weeks of love and desire in our matrimonial state and of thinking the same thoughts and finishing each other’s sentences.

  How could it get so hard so fast?

  December

  There are any number of reasons why a person with my history would go to church. Here are some. I went to an Episcopal boarding school during my high school years, for example, and we had mandatory chapel four days a week there. After four days of chapel a week for four years you just get used to going. Or: my mother is a fervent churchgoer and believer in church, who cycled through a number of denominations as a younger person, and who thus came to Episcopalianism through a laborious intellectual journey of the sort I admire, and who therefore gave to me what she got from her experiences. She believed, and she dragged me along, metaphorically, until I believed. Or: I had a drug and alcohol problem when I was younger, and in many recovery communities, going to church is considered an important part of overcoming an addiction, and I wanted to do everything that was recommended to me as regards overcoming addiction. As with everything about my drug and alcohol problem and its treatment, I took very seriously the idea that my answer lay in still more spiritual development. Or: my cousin, Jack Moody, is, as I have said, a retired minister, and spending time with him at church has been an important part of my adulthood. I like spending time with him, with family, on Sundays.

  These would all have been good reasons to go, I suppose, and are all part of the reasoning that resulted in my going to church. They are practical reasons. And even more practical is the fact of my daughter, and part of going to church was wanting to find a place for her, a community for her, in a church environment. Maybe I wanted this because I don’t feel like an especially acute ethicist. But also simply because I like community and belonging. I have wanted my daughter to have the opportunity for belonging too.

  My regular attendance, as opposed to occasional attendance, a
t Trinity Church on Wall Street, New York, New York, began because during my first marriage I appreciated taking my daughter for the morning on Sundays and going to church without my wife. It was a way to create a tradition with my daughter, and an activity that was unique to us, apart from her mother, who wasn’t terribly interested. Church was a space where I could feel that I was definitively doing some good, and spending real time with my daughter on a worthy project.

  We went to a number of different services at Trinity Wall Street, some at Trinity itself, which is a big, imposing space right at the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway. At Trinity, I often felt like Hazel was insufficiently reverent, or that the other parishioners at Trinity were less interested in the vocalizations of my daughter. Later, we went to a 10:00 a.m. service at St. Paul’s Chapel, which is a Trinity satellite space, directly across the street from the World Trade Center site. The 10:00 a.m. service had a progressive edge to it. There was actual dancing during the service, for example, which was not easy for me, and lots of singing in which we were often schooled at the beginning of the service by a cantor. There were silences of such duration that we were encouraged to meditate during them. And almost all the priests who served at the 10:00 a.m. regularly were gay. (This was a great thing, for me, in a period in which I wanted the church to be doing more, progressively speaking, on social issues and social justice, in part because I was disappointed by Trinity’s ineffective response to the Occupy Wall Street movement, which was camped out at its very front door, and which might have been removed en masse to a Trinity-owned space on Canal Street after their ejection from Zuccotti Park, but was not. In fact, one day I was at church, with Jack Moody, and there was a guy from Occupy at coffee hour, perhaps for the free coffee and cookies, and he sat and talked to us for a bit, before the rector of Trinity Church came over and buttonholed him, this Occupy foot soldier. What began as sort of casual agree-to-disagree conversation became extremely heated, with the rector accusing Occupy of posting his private information online (doxxing him, as the lingo goes), to which the Occupy guy noted there was no general agreement to do any such thing, and that, in any event, he had not done it himself personally, and thought it was a bad idea. It was distressing to watch persons of two generations unable to agree on much at all, though at least to this observer, they were both right, up to a point, and both effective deployers of their respective messages. This encounter, and the bad blood of it, made me feel even more passionately that the church had an obligation to help the Occupy movement, and when Trinity seemed to tire of any such obligations, I felt greatly disappointed about it, as if the oligarchs had won again.)