The Long Accomplishment

by Rick Moody

  I was invited by Michael Martone, a writer and professor with impeccable experimental bona fides, and also simply one of the nicest people on earth. Martone, among his many strengths, had also been (along with his wife, the excellent poet Theresa Pappas) Laurel’s occasional babysitter, back when he taught at Iowa State with Laurel’s dad. However, once our trip to the University of Alabama wheeled into view, after months of thinking it was impossibly far off, Martone’s own father became ill, to the very precipice of his mortality, and Laurel and I took off for Alabama without much expectation of community. It was, in effect, just another short-term teaching gig, one I was lucky to have, but one that was going to have a certain relentless sameness to it.

  Luckily, Laurel had a number of photographs she was going to take in the Deep South. And with our rental car, we chased DNA portraits into the deepest of the Deep South, and we ate a bunch of grits, and we watched the fraternity and sorority boys and girls of a southern state school amble around in what was already spring weather, many of them sporting what we had come to think of as the no pants look, meaning shorts with a long baggy T-shirt whose hem fell only an inch or so above the lowest margin of the shorts. There was something infantilized about the fashion decision making, as if they were all giant toddlers, in their brightly colored onesies.

  By the end of the time in Tuscaloosa, with a few new photos in Laurel’s project saved on the relevant hard drives, we decided that Mary Ivie was at a point where some supervision was urgently required, and therefore we just took our rental vehicle and started driving, a thousand miles or so from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to Ames, Iowa.

  In a way, Laurel and I were made to travel, to do this kind of turn-on-a-dime traveling, and it’s both a blessing and a shame these days that we don’t have as much time to do it as we did formerly. Laurel was in Estonia for a bit the first year we were together and in Poland a couple of times, and she had to be talked out of a trip to South Korea in the same interval. And the two of us, when feeling less satisfied with what was in front of us in the way of work, were perfectly happy to get in the car and drive a thousand miles. (In fact, we’d just driven all the way from Brooklyn to New Smyrna, Florida, and back.) Listening to the radio, and watching the miles go past. I think it was a problem-solving technique in some ways. We had similar habits about travel—bring nothing, book cheap tickets, don’t stay more than a day longer than the absolute minimum, always try to go to places you haven’t been to before, make the travel serve the work—and there were no questions asked when either of us wanted to go. We’d just go, as long as we were willing to take the other.

  It was in this period that I really became interested in writing about travel, in trying to make all of our travel pay off aesthetically in some way. I became interested in trying to write in the worst circumstances—not at a desk with all my precious books around me, and with a fountain pen, and photos of my family before me—but in the not-terribly-good hotels that we were often staying in on our journeys together. Often Laurel, whose thyroid problems were about to be diagnosed in our journey of fertility, such that she would, shortly, no longer have to sleep thirteen hours a night, was often asleep long after I was awake and ready to face the world, or, more exactly, ready to face the oatmeal tin at another somewhat lackluster complimentary hotel breakfast, and in the hours when I was waiting for her, I would conceal myself in some corner of the room where the illuminated screen of my laptop would not bother her, and begin the fictitious hotel reviews that became my novel of 2015, Hotels of North America (while failing to deliver the work I had agreed upon with my publishers, the book with the conventional heroism in it). The trips with Laurel were invaluable for the novel, and they became such a shared concern, and an area where our work seemed to be influencing each other’s. The hotels were a by-product of Laurel’s photographs, and the hotels in turn became the centerpiece of my project.

  The mutual influence, artistically, in our marriage, runs deeper than this suggests. Because Laurel’s technique, for the DNA portraits, was something she perfected one night in Tucson, Arizona, when I was reading there, and I took her out toward Saguaro National Park, to a high desert pass I liked over there, and we sat for a while and gazed at the night sky. There was a passage in my novel The Four Fingers of Death about the stars as one perceived them in the Sonoran Desert, and I used to read it aloud on tour every night, or almost every night, when I read from that novel. Laurel came on a lot of those events, and when I took her up into the mountain pass overlooking the city, she began trying to perfect a way to both shoot the stars above Tucson and shoot us at the same time. It’s not that the book influenced her directly so much as the stars of Tucson influenced us both, and the book was the occasion of this. That’s when she began experimenting with the old flashlight. I don’t know how many photographs we took of ourselves that night, the night of my reading at the University of Arizona, or how many times she flashed the flashlight on me, standing in the dirt pull-over by the side of the mountain pass, but that’s when she started to conceptualize her own particular available-light technique, because of the night sky. If I were scoring it, I’d say: Laurel was tangentially influenced by the passage from The Four Fingers of Death, and my tour provided the site-specific revelation about her photographic undertaking (the DNA portraits that she ultimately called Strangers and Relations), and then I in turn conceived of making a novel out of hotel reviews as a result of accompanying Laurel at the many roadside hotels and motels that she stayed in while shooting her images.

  Early in the period of getting to know each other, I wanted passionately to collaborate with Laurel on something, as I have often collaborated in my work. I have found the process of collaboration epiphanic and have felt some great surge of joy from making work with other artists. There is also a deep learning that can take place in these circumstances. In the context of our relationship, though, despite my innumerable offers to write a screenplay for Laurel, or to get mixed up into her creative process, it has turned out that it doesn’t make any sense for us to collaborate specifically or directly. We collaborate on family. As Laurel is a person who likes to work alone, and who is an intense perfectionist along the axis of her creativity, it has become more rewarding to track subconscious pathways of contact, as I have done just now, the more organic and unplanned ways we have collaborated, the way influence has passed back and forth between us peripherally, unconsciously, without really having to talk about it at all. If it ever happens these days that I take a decent photograph (which is infrequent), it is because Laurel’s ideas of framing have started to sink in, after seven years together. And, similarly, I noticed not long ago that she composed a piece with a lot of semicolons. A long run-on sentence with semicolons. It did look a little like a paragraph that I might have written, or, at least, a paragraph that I might have influenced slightly, even if its meanings were all hers. This influence, across the platforms of our work, is made stronger by not being interrogated terribly much, and our collaboration is more comprehensive for not being driven by one or the other of us. It just is. It’s a measure of time spent together, and in the company of each other’s work. In a way, our individual tendencies are still there, but they have become less individual, because in each case the other is helping out in ways large and small throughout the production of the work. It’s all collaborative, just not in the way you might think, not project oriented, unless the project is life.

  Connecting up the ligaments of the South and the Midwest was just not something I had done, really, so going through Mississippi, and Arkansas, and the whole length of Missouri, and then up into Iowa satisfied some wanderlust, some inner need to avoid stopping at all costs, especially when we were outrunning a lot of stress, a long list of nearly crippling events.

  We ended up stopping for dinner in Iowa City, because one of Laurel’s best friends, Dora Malech, had graduated from the writer’s workshop there, and had stuck around in town. I hadn’t been in town in fifteen years, since a reading at Prair
ie Lights bookstore, and couldn’t remember that much about it, but we were landing in town on a Friday night, and like Ames, Iowa, where the college president had just canceled an annual homecoming festival because of drinking and vandalism, Iowa City was noteworthy for the absolute abandon of its Friday nights. It was rare in my life (excepting maybe a Saturday night I had once observed in Reykjavik) to see so many kids so bent on reducing themselves to pedestrian-mall beer zombies, made only to stumble around and vomit up servings of beer so that they might have some more. I should not be seen to be in judgment of the drinking habits of the young, when I myself managed to become an alcoholic in my twenties. And yet: Iowa City on a Friday night was an abject and dehumanized place; the scale of drinking had a sort of factory-farming quality, like sows at a trough, and as we sat trying to eat a burrito downtown, a drunken guy slid repeatedly into our booth in a way both earnest and disheveled, while trying to pick up Dora, who, though she was a married person, tolerated his aimless and slurred conversational overtures, at least for a few minutes. Then we got the hell out of Iowa City and drove the last two hours to Ames.

  Was this the trip where I noticed that Mary had a life-sized sculpture of Jesus next to her armchair? She did, and somehow it became a completely reasonable and even reverent appurtenance the longer we sat with her. I remember that it was my chore, because of good typing skills, to type up a list of names and numbers to put on Mary’s refrigerator, so she wouldn’t have to flip through several old date planners and a few scraps of paper, in search of an old friend and her number. These names and addresses seem like some effaced bit of quotidian life signaling through a receding past to Mary. No longer were the names and addresses written on randomized scraps, or bits of an envelope (Dickinson-style), or on a scrap of memo paper, or a Chinese food menu in the corner, now they signaled loud and proud on the front of the refrigerator, This is my life, I can find what I need here. Our only doubts being that a) she would forget that the names were on the refrigerator, b) that she would forget to whom the names belonged, c) that she would forget how to operate her flip phone, d) that she would forget how to talk into the phone. (There were a lot of other things we were worried about her forgetting, too, like her many accomplishments as an adult—her time as an EMS technician, her time founding a Waldorf school in Ames, her studies in comparative religion, not to mention her boundless maternal love.) We didn’t know if any of these forking paths were the paths ahead, or which, and the names and addresses felt like an earnest attempt to keep these paths from coming into view, ahead around a bend, and so we typed in an effort to forestall what was perhaps inevitable.

  The life-sized Jesus was so to-scale, and so Caucasian looking, and so mild and gentle in demeanor that it was hard to think of him doing anything but preaching about the kingdom of heaven while using a lot of exotic figurative language. There was no reason to assume that Jesus was anything but benevolent, though intimidating at life-size, and it was possible to tolerate him up to a point. He was the perfect Jesus for Mary Ivie in her hour of need, even if he was about to be returned to his rightful owner, Mary’s old Iowa friend, Jeanine, who would also take Mary in anew while we attempted to find her next home.

  I was teaching adjunct-style at NYU in the spring of 2014, as I had done for three years, and that year the topic was literature from Eastern Europe, one of the first texts of which was from the Romantic Era predecessor Heinrich von Kleist. It had been difficult for me, as a young person, to understand Heinrich von Kleist, because there is some kind of strange noncausal sequence of events in Kleist, many times. Things happen, but it’s very unclear if they are caused to happen, or even if one event leads to another event. In Kleist, it’s more that events take place, disassociatively, and we are at their mercy. We, the readers, impose an interpretation of events, even though their sequence is contestable, and thus it was Kleist, as you can see, all around us.

  April

  I mean, in the thick of 2013–14, in which Laurel and I were trying to be newlyweds, and human frailty was everywhere happening around us, it was easy on occasion to feel like we were in a Kleist story, in which nothing caused anything exactly, but there was poignancy at every turn, all of it obscure, hard to interpret, explosive. There were explosions of poignancy. It was an explosions-of-poignancy life. There was a deer carcass in the yard of our house upstate, for example, when the snow melted, and Hazel and I were out walking in the backyard, when she said, What is that over there? Meaning what was that thing protruding from the lawn over there in the corner of the yard by where the scrub stretched out luxuriously for a bit. What is that? Well, it turned out to be the upended rib cage of a deer in the yard, which had probably been taken out by some larger predator, but which larger predator in our neighborhood could do something like that?

  We had seen coyote in the yard, we had seen fox in the yard, we had seen eagles in the yard, even the occasional turkey vulture in the yard. We had even seen a bobcat on two occasions. You’re not supposed to see bobcat, at least not often, and in the spirit of Heinrich von Kleist it would be possible to see one and simply to wonder at its appearance without interpreting it or believing it emblematic. I would estimate that our bobcat was in the forty to fifty pound range, with big substantial paws. So different, in terms of the volume of menace, and chutzpah, from its distant relative: the domestic shorthair. It loped across the lawn in a way that did not quite say, for example, I will disembowel you and not think twice, it wasn’t quite that brazen, but neither was it in any way afraid. I suppose only a bear or a mountain lion would cause the bobcat to feel afraid. Did the bobcat make piecemeal of the yearling?

  And there had been a bear in the neighborhood. Our just-over-the-ridge neighbor, who had a single cow on the property, until the cow got made into a bunch of cuts of beef in the freezer, and who also had pigs, and bees, that neighbor had seen the bear, and I use the singular here to describe the bear though I am powerless to evaluate whether or not it is multiple. The neighbor even noted that the bear pushed over the beehive and helped her- or himself to all the honey to be found there. We might imagine that the bear didn’t quite come over the hill and down closer to Route 22, because that would be unwise for the bear, and yet there was something large enough to bend our birdfeeder out back of the kitchen like it was a sapling, emptying all the seed out on the lawn and then pawing through it.

  My point is we didn’t and don’t know exactly what killed the deer on the lawn, what killed the deer and left the skull and the rib cage twenty or so feet apart, all but entirely denuded of anything that might conceivably have looked like the soft-tissue portion of the deer. Hazel was in a phase where nothing much triggered revulsion in her (indeed she has often been in this phase), and she wanted to get closer to the deer remains. So we got right up close. The community of deer, in the first of the thaw, had this strange tendency to walk a particular way across the lawn, monodirectionally, as though they had a footpath. It was a reasonably large lawn (because this was all happening in poverty-stricken eastern Dutchess County), and there might have been many ways to cross it, but the deer crossed it in just the one way. The upturned rib cage, which looked like paleo-futurist lawn furniture for elves, was right on the deer path through the lawn, as though the bobcat, or the mountain lion, or the coyote, or maybe a drunken yahoo in the neighborhood with a firearm, had slain the deer right out in the open on its regular perambulations.

  There’s no particular end to my anecdote, which means that it’s in the style of Heinrich von Kleist, except this: I dragged the rib cage to the edge of the forest, using a sturdy tree limb, and then I did the same with the skull, during which Hazel asked if we could take all the bones up to the house, bleach them in a vat, and then attempt to reassemble the deer, but on this point I demurred, owing to the partial qualities of the skeleton. It was not a full-sized deer, as I have noted, it was a yearling, and so the skull was not so large as to be truly the stuff of horror cinema. With Hazel, my daughter, we stashed the skull near the rib
cage (and what of the remainder?) and then all three of us, Laurel, Hazel, and I, said a prayer for the deer, as we always do when dispensing with wildlife, like the pileated woodpecker that flew straight into one of the windows on the side of the house and then collapsed dead on the windshield of our car. My God, was that upsetting.

  Nature, red in tooth and claw, as the poet Tennyson had it, and as in the struggle with infertility, which we didn’t discuss with Hazel, and didn’t much discuss with my family, but kept between the two of us, between Laurel and myself, because what was there to say to others, but that we were trying, and often failing rather painfully, and just sort of putting one foot in front of the other, and it was easy to allegorize events like the deer carcass in the yard, but how to come up with a coherent response, a kind of dramatic rising to the occasion. Laurel, for all of her sometimes hard-boiled feelings about the foibles of human beings, had boundless feelings of responsibility for animals, the more innocent, the more boundless the feeling. She regularly escorted bugs out of the house, even the ladybugs that had a tendency to blight the place in fall and spring. She resisted even my vacuuming and releasing when there were dozens of them. Spiders were escorted out. And she had a very practical method for removing bees and wasps that involved an overturned glass and an index card.