The Long Accomplishment

by Rick Moody

  I had been looking around to try something similar, because it sounded like so much fun, and I decided that I would trade my second copy of Building Stories to whomever offered me something really incredible for it, after which I would try to trade that item to someone else, and so on.

  This proposition, the bartering of the extra copy of Ware’s book, generated a fair amount of discussion on Facebook at one point, and I believe one guy did invite me to stay for a week in Italy, or maybe Greece, but because I am shy and can’t really stand being anyone’s guest for very long, I did not take the week in Greece. How foolish! I think there were some other interesting offers too. But I decided that the best offer, for no reason that I can re-create now, was the postcard signed by Charles Manson.

  Of course, it came from the guy I knew who was staying in the federal penitentiary. Apparently, he had not only been corresponding with literary writers in those years, but also with some more hard-core criminal types. I don’t know the extent of it. But somehow he had found himself attempting to correspond with Charles Manson. If you are my age, you perhaps, like I do, associate Charles Manson with a certain kind of California—with LSD, and the out-of-control period of the Beach Boys, with deranged interpretations of Beatles songs, with the Summer of Love and its philosophies converted all at once into the obverse, malevolent and incoherent evil. You associate Charles Manson with that book Helter Skelter, by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry, and with the photos of Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme in the police cruiser relieved of her firearm, after her attempt to assassinate President Gerald Ford. Maybe the younger persons turning these pages don’t know as much about Manson and his band of followers, or associate him primarily with any list of dangerous and legendary serial killers that includes Richard Ramirez, John Wayne Gacy, et al., all available on the internet. But the psychedelic California, the bad acid California of that lost time, that’s how I think of him.

  I can’t say exactly why my friend thought procuring and storing up the Manson postcard was a good idea, and perhaps it was simply that he was killing time in prison and wanted some memorabilia associated with his residence. I can’t say exactly why I thought it was a good trade either, except that perhaps it would be easy to trade to someone else. I think I still felt bad about my friend’s incarceration (he was soon released, and is on firm footing these days), and so I wanted to help him out. Apparently, I couldn’t see the obvious menace of the object.

  My friend’s cover letter, which followed with the postcard, said:

  New Year’s Day, 2013

  Hi Rick,

  Here’s Charlie, hope he arrived intact. The poem on the back is not by Manson, but by his “prison secretary.” Signature on front is Charlie’s (signed MacManson). Note the swastika through his last name. What a guy, that Manson.

  Then my friend wrote a few pleasantries, and concluded with: “Ah the curse is lifted (just kidding) (maybe).”

  The Manson signature is on the front of an old-fashioned picture postcard. Laterally across a photograph of a squirrel standing in a posture that I suppose I would describe as fully erect, sort of waving at the camera with one hand, from his perch atop a stump. The inscription, in blue ballpoint, does, in fact, say “Charles MacManson.” And there is a sort of a swastika.

  The poem, on the reverse, goes as follows:

  Friends, countrymen,

  Lend me your ears,

  All knowledge is moonshine

  We are here and it is now

  The Little Zen

  For Charlie

  Let’s review the lamentable facts. I wrote a book review of a book I really loved (the first sentence of the review was “This book is a masterpiece”), and then I decided to trade my extra copy of that book, hoping that I could, through some conceptual art smarts, convert that book, ultimately, into a house in Nova Scotia, or maybe Newfoundland. And somehow I determined that the first thing I should trade for was a postcard signed by a guy with a swastika carved into his head, who was responsible for the murder of seven people. It is true that when I was an undergraduate at Brown University, there was a professor in the film department who had once made it his business to publish a chapbook of Manson’s remarks from his sentencing hearing in 1971, and in the giddy, sometimes repellant political environment of Brown, circa 1983, this publication was considered genuinely revolutionary. However, I have also read comments by Sharon Tate’s sister, that is, the sister of one of Manson’s victims, and I found them heartrending and persuasive; I can only say that I felt that the Manson signature, which I imagine is one of many circulating out in the world (items signed by Manson start at $100 and go up from there on various true crime collectible sites), would be valuable for my bartering project.

  You would have thought that the appended note at the bottom of the covering letter, “Ah the curse is lifted,” would have been the sign, or that I would have felt a slight chill at reading the poem by Manson’s “prison secretary,” with its ominous and Eastern, “All wisdom is moonshine / We are here and it is now.” Sort of reminds you of that koan that suggests that if you meet the Buddha in the road you should kill him. And yet: much of the contemporary outsider language orbiting around Charles Manson tends to overlook the horror done by him, and so I can only say that I did what many others have done, which is to say I neglected the facts for a moment. I averted my gaze, and allowed the Charles Manson signature into my apartment in Brooklyn, where it sat in my drawer.

  The trouble began almost immediately.

  It would be too obvious, and the mechanism too transparent, if I were to tell you that the death and destruction that visited themselves upon my life, and the lives of my wife, Laurel (who was only my fiancée at the time of the acquisition of the postcard), and my daughter, were caused by Manson. And so let me reassure you that it is not that obvious. The Manson curse is simply a slow-acting metaphor. Not immediately identifiable. Mostly at the beginning of 2013, I was trying to finish a novel that I had told my publishers I was writing for almost four years, and of which I had written 250 pages without conviction of any kind.

  And I was trying to finish my divorce. Regularly, as I have said, I was going to a lawyer’s office.

  Collaborative divorce, as I have said, involved the two separating parties hiring lawyers familiar with the collaborative divorce process and then sitting down for regular meetings in which people discuss the various issues until they come to some joint decision about what should happen to the property being divided. It sounds great in theory. I am sure it works well for some couples.

  In practice, the meetings took place in a mostly undecorated windowless room at my lawyer’s office, and involved four people saying awful things to one another. First my wife and I said awful things to each other, and then we waited while the lawyers said awful things to us. Then one of the lawyers would say: “Okay, let’s pick it up there in ten days.” Though I understood that the legal professionals were decent and hardworking, I felt great overpowering waves of contempt for nearly everyone involved in negotiating my divorce.

  My wife looked at me, across the table, with an expression that was pitying, irritated, and smug, and her lawyer always was most melodious when asking if I was hiding more money. And was I willing to surrender half of my copyrights for the work produced during the period of our marriage? I had never had anyone talk to me in this way before. Not even my parents, when I was at my most unpleasant, in my early twenties, when they were exasperated and didn’t know what to do with me. Even they didn’t talk to me like this. And apparently I was paying tens of thousands of dollars in order to be talked to like this.

  I knew several other people getting divorced at the same time, including a visual artist friend, whose wife had considerable familial resources and had therefore hired very expensive lawyers with the avowed intention of destroying him financially. She told him she was going to destroy him. She would probably argue that he deserved to be destroyed, and of course my insight into the internal dynamics of their marr
iage is limited. But who really deserves to be destroyed? Why is dominance a legitimate goal in the process? Doesn’t that make you into the thing you hate? What I know is that I saw my friend during his divorce, and I saw another friend, a writer and artist, whose husband was threatening to bring out in court the facts of her flirtation with heroin now decades in the past, just in order to try to secure an economically favorable outcome—I saw that friend during her divorce, her drawn features, her intense agitation and anxiety. It was a confraternity, my close friends in the throes of divorce, class of 2013, all of them somnambulists, as they watched, apparently powerless to intervene, as decades of ambition and security were obliterated.

  Every other activity in life was contaminated by it, this process of divorce, and by contamination, I mean the literal thing, as if divorce were a particularly nasty virus for which there was no vaccine yet, and it went about engendering hemorrhagic fountaining in your daily affairs. If I took my daughter to a birthday party at her friend’s house, a friend who knew my ex-wife, I could feel the mixture of curiosity and disdain for me at the party, a sort of nauseated fascination; I could feel the tendency of certain friends to pick a side that was not my side; I could feel people making up their minds without inquiring into the facts of my life; and then there was the going to pick up my daughter at her mother’s apartment, which had been my apartment not long before, whose boxes I had moved into that space, myself, whose dishes I had washed, and seeing the doormen there, only some of whom had elected to be nonpartisan initially as regarded the divorce. They no longer would call me by name. Or the uncomfortable rides up in the elevator, to pick up my daughter, where, for example, that ambitious academic on one of the lower floors had apparently decided that it was simply politically sound to have nothing to do with me on the elevator, and who therefore waited with me for the elevator in silence. There was not a moment that was uncontaminated, there was not a moment in which I was not a homunculus, a protruding of additional tissue that my ex-wife needed to have cut out.

  I am certain that many of the people who participated in this divorce-related contamination are not bad people, and probably did not know they were doing it, or certainly did not experience the moment at the elevator in exactly the way that I experienced it, but that is just what it means, in life, to choose the ready path, the superficial path, in evaluating a social situation. Stopping yourself, in the midst of your haste, and really thinking about what other people might be feeling is the hardest thing to do, and I am bad at it myself often enough, but I want to stop and think about what the other person is thinking because I believe the ability to do that is what indicates growth in our time here. The goal is never to deny the subjectivity, the personhood of the other person, but rather to affirm that subjectivity, to affirm it in all its stupendous and contradictory humanness. And yet this denial happens every day.

  I threw in with the other sufferers of divorce. I knew their look of dejection, their pounds shed, their incipient alcoholism, their profound cynicism, their inability to finish any creative work, I knew that feeling, I know it now, and I don’t care what they did in their marriage, or who is to blame (because in almost all cases it’s not a person who causes the marriage to fail, anyhow, it’s the internal dynamics of the marriage, it’s the folie à deux), I only know that to wade into the divorce part of marriage is to root around in the cesspools of humanity, in the lowest circles of hell, and no one who has not gone through a difficult divorce knows exactly how exquisite the horror is. Divorce is like wartime surgery, it’s like surgery in the field, it’s like amputation in the field, without opiation, or divorce is like watching pieces of your body fly away in front of you and trying to gather them back in before wobbling over to the battlefield surgeon, and what is lost are the very ideas of love and faith and belief. In divorce, it’s the person to whom you once expressed the marital vows avowing something diametrically opposed: I want your future to be insecure, I hope it’s worse for you from here on out.

  Every week or two, I went to go see the lawyers. And then when I was lucky enough, when I wasn’t being penalized for reasons I couldn’t understand, I got to see my daughter.

  She was about four at the time.

  Now, it is worth saying that my daughter is among the very best things that have ever happened to me. If not the very best, then tied for the very best. Throughout my thirties, when I wanted to be one of those men who disdain reproduction, because my writing was so important, and kids were going to get in the way of my vaunted creativity, I didn’t yet know that my daughter was going to be tied for the very best thing that ever happened to me. I have a friend whose partner said to her once: “There’s an unfreedom associated with children.” I think now of the tremendous vanity of the childless Rick Moody, and of the many mistakes in my life’s journey that I associate with that time, the selfishness of my earlier self, the selfishness, I would go so far as to say, of a certain masculine idea of literature or art-making that I practiced unapologetically when younger.

  My daughter, who finally appeared when I was age forty-seven, mitigated the better portion of my vanities, and she did it in an inadvertent way, with her fervent and unstoppable enthusiasms, her love of all the stuff I would have said I didn’t want in my life, her monochromatic obsession with pink, her Disney princesses, her five books a day, her verbiage, her mild stuttering (which started not long after the divorce), her elegiac love for her cousin, Tyler, and so on. I was, and am, a father who has trouble getting out of his head and into the world of children, but who is incredibly happy once I do so, and who can tolerate the repetitions of children’s games as though they are musical compositions, but my difficulties with the mechanics of parenting are no indicator of the amount of love that I feel for my daughter. I am often overcome by it. In moments when I am doing other things (it happened, in fact, last week in the checkout line at the supermarket), I will powerfully feel the need to weep because of how much I love my daughter. When the Judeo-Christian tradition uses the metaphor for God that he or she is a father or mother, a parent, I understand God that much better, the helpless love of a parent for a child, and I think this is an ingenious metaphor, because if it accords with the surfeit of helplessness that I sometimes feel for this child who I didn’t even know I wanted until I was in my mid-forties—maybe God does, in fact, care in ways that are interesting.

  I am sure that my daughter’s mother feels the same way, and I am glad for my daughter that she has two parents who feel this way about her, but the fact that this became, for a moment, a contested item in my divorce, the amount of time that I would spend with my daughter, was among the darkest and most annihilating stretches of human discussion I’ve ever had to live through. I had already dealt with the idea that I wasn’t going to see her every day, and now it was a matter of debate whether she was ready to stay with me 50 percent of the time. Having to defend your right to see your child kind of makes you want to stay in bed all day. And abandon the novel you’re supposedly working on.

  To be clear, four years earlier, in 2009, I had taken a contract from my longtime publishers to write a novel, and I had this idea that I would try to write a conventional novel, in which there was a hero (a radio producer at some kind of fictional public radio network) who faced hard times (he was in Baghdad at the “end” of the Iraq War, and was badly injured by a roadside bombing near the Palestine Hotel) and attempted to recover from them. It sounds so reasonable. But it quickly became apparent that there was nothing left in me that could write this conventional novel. The conventional novel, when I heard people talking about it, or arguing in its behalf, brought out in me something like those episodes in the illness of Virginia Woolf, in which she could hear birds talking in Greek. The partisans for this or that issue-oriented contemporary novel sounded to me like birds talking, or more accurately like birds complaining.

  So, in the beginning of 2013, I was supposed to be working on that.

  But it happens that at that time I was also workin
g on a photo exhibition that would include the first-ever exhibition of photographs by my late sister, Meredith Moody.

  My sister, during the last fifteen years of her life, took a lot of photographs, always intending to try to do something with them, but never quite getting there. As with many women artists of the seventies and eighties, making a living and having children somehow got in the way of her artistic work. Moreover, photography was, at that time, still locked in a struggle with the art establishment in which it was sort of a bastard art form (or, at least, this is how I see the timeline of the form), and it was not included in the collections of the major New York museums. My sister loved Ansel Adams, loved that sort of painterly nature photography, and was always trying to reproduce that style with a 35-millimeter camera, shooting, especially, sunsets in the Northeast.

  When Meredith died, one of the things my family did to remember her was to start an endowed residency at an artists’ colony in upstate New York, the colony known as Yaddo. Under the terms of this endowed residency, a woman photographer has free travel and up to two months of time to make work—shoot photos, edit photos, or print photos—after which, every year, my family purchases one of her photos. In this way, beginning in 1997, we began to amass a collection of photographs by these photographers, those upon whom was bestowed the Meredith S. Moody Residency at Yaddo, and when we hit the fifteen-year mark, we began to try to find a way to exhibit this work. I have to say, every year, when my father goes to visit the studio of whoever has won the residency, and brings back some images from her, and we all sit around a table and mull over the various images, it’s like some blessing has been meted out upon our family, a blessing with which to paper over a scar. With each photograph we begin to feel, a little more clearly, how to recover from grief, and from the caverns of loss that one travels into.