The Long Accomplishment

by Rick Moody

  This was the lesson of Laurel’s Strangers and Relations project: you could find family anywhere, and in it you could emphasize difference, if that was your wish, or you could emphasize affiliation, and that’s what she did when she photographed the distant cousins. She created the affiliation, created the connection through which affiliation might take place, and it was always repaid to Laurel twice over.

  Then we drove back down into Texas, from Oklahoma, to return our rental car and fly home.

  From where I am sitting now, it’s hard to imagine that we logged all the miles we logged that year, and the one that followed. And I only went on 50 or 60 percent of Laurel’s photo shoots. She was often out in Montana or in Arkansas, calling me from the road, from some dangerous motel where they asked her in reception if she was a teenage runaway and if she was going to do drugs in the room. But I went on some of the harder and more unpredictable shoots. There was always a hard reentry.

  After all of this—wedding, and photo shoots—we walked back into the apartment in Park Slope with exactly this kind of culture shock only to find that: the apartment smelled bad.

  And I mean not that it smelled really bad, like we had left garlicky Thai food in the refrigerator for the ten days we were away, or like there was a dead mouse in the hall, but like there was an overpowering chemical of some kind dispersing in our apartment. Because I can never (I think it’s safe to say) adjust to an emergency, or a crisis, immediately, but always seem to need a day or two to mull it over, to decide if the crisis is really critical, I was mad that Laurel was saying the chemical smell was dangerous and we should get the fuck out of the apartment. I had just come home, and I wasn’t going to not be at home, and I wasn’t going to accept that someone, somehow, had put us out of our residence in this particular way. But it did kind of smell awful. I persuaded Laurel to try to spend the night there, and we slept, the two of us, in my daughter’s twin bed, because her room had the most windows, and we opened these and got fans blowing, and we both woke up with horrible headaches, at which point we fled out of town for our house upstate. And there we stayed for several days.

  Upon investigation, it seemed clear that what had happened was this: the renovation of the palatial two-apartments-fashioned-into-one apartment next door, the renovation of the southern lady and her enormous Flemish or Belgian husband, had culminated in quite a bit of varnishing of the floor, which had been undertaken without proper ventilation, and which had then (because of the way the drafts worked in the building, which had resulted in our earlier cannabinoid contact buzz from the prior owners) ventilated almost entirely into our space. Our windows had been closed while we were in Texas, bantering with gun owners and other distant relatives.

  It happened we knew the super of our building, the pretty excellent super who had replaced the guy with the drinking problem, and the pretty excellent super could, at least, be relied on to tell the truth to a somewhat financially overstretched artist couple as opposed to the one percenters who’d just moved into the building, and who subcontracted, it seemed, laborers who were perhaps being encouraged to cut corners. The pretty excellent super took up the matter of the floor finish, which the subcontractors insisted was “eco,” despite the fact that they had dumped empty polyurethane containers down in the basement, right by the super’s office, even though polyurethane floor finish was prohibited by the building, according to the rules of the co-op board, precisely because of the possibility of creating environmental problems with the neighboring apartments. That polyurethane is a neurotoxin is, I think, irrefutable, and easy to verify quickly with research, online and otherwise. And the effect of it in small quarters, in six hundred square feet, is hard to describe if you haven’t had the displeasure of trying to acclimate to it in this way.

  When in due course we again arrived back in Brooklyn, in order to spend a few days with my daughter, we really had no choice but to confront the truth: that we couldn’t live in our apartment. Because Hazel, my daughter, was friends with a group of four girls her very age in the building, a girl squad, one other of whom was in her father’s apartment only half-time, we had a place to stay for a couple of nights, while we put in four incredibly powerful window fans to try to evacuate the fumes from our actual apartment. My daughter kept saying, with incredible urgency, “Why can’t we go home?” while standing forlornly by our front door looking in at the devastation as the fans blew. Because I am extremely stubborn in some ways, just ridiculously bent on doing things the same way I did them yesterday, I went in there regularly to get my clothes and to shave, and so on, but I often found that my knees kept getting weak if I spent too long inside, as if I were going to pass out. I was clutching the sink basin to get finished with a shave the second morning, wondering if I was killing more brain cells than when I was an active alcoholic. That the whole situation made us look bad, or so it seemed to me, made us unable to provide a reliable place for my daughter to stay while with us, made us seem like ineffective, bohemian, crisis-afflicted parents, and this caused real hurt for me, and remorse. Feeling I have let down my daughter is the worst feeling of all. And that was in addition to looking like people who were overreacting to neurotoxins.

  And for Laurel, the situation was even worse, far worse, in that her family had and has a real sensitivity to chemicals. They do not evacuate the toxins with the tumor-suppressing effectiveness of Moodys. Her aunt Katherine, she who had died not long before Nate’s wedding, had been exposed to an abundance of chemicals while working as a receptionist or administrative assistant at a manufacturing firm in her youth, and had become increasingly neurologically afflicted over the course of her life as a result. She was housebound in her later years, had little effective immune system, had all kinds of mysterious ailments, rheumatic, autoimmune, and otherwise. Laurel is avoidant of chemicals and their odor both by inclination and physiologically. She literally cannot stand a minute with a powerfully industrial or chemical smell. And there we were, with our apartment that we could not use, but were paying for, next door to the more affluent professional types, who had smoked us out so that they could renovate their multimillion-dollar apartment for their own imminent baby.

  This would have been funny if it were happening to anyone else, because it was such a Park Slope story. Now that we are gone I can perhaps take this moment to indicate why it was so hard to like Park Slope, Brooklyn, and why the changing face of Park Slope was bringing into relief features implicit in its sense of self-regard. Park Slope was the kind of place where whether or not to boycott products manufactured in a certain Middle Eastern country is of such urgency that friendships can end as a result. Park Slope is the kind of place where you live near not one but two private day schools that require (as my divorce lawyer suggested to me) a $600,000 annual income to be affordable. The kind of place where suggesting that you are not going to transition your preteen child, even though she likes boys’ clothes, because she has indicated no wish to transition, gets you a death threat (true story!). And where abandoning the public school system because the middle school is integrated seems like the most normal thing you could do. It was the most natural place for us to live, because of all the writers who live there, and, as a result, the most depressing to me. The homogeneity, the blind acceptance of dogmatic approaches to contemporary life, were increasingly hard to fathom, or to live with comfortably, and I implicate myself in these crimes. Were I to attempt further to boil down my resistance, it would be in the following way: I dislike ideological purity, which doesn’t exist in nature. No one is pure. Humanity is always corrupt in one way or another, despite its touching need for gold-plated and laudable ideals. Everyone’s beliefs, when lived out, when activated, when embodied, are fungible, complex, contradictory, much more so than whatever it is they proclaim before a Park Slope co-op board meeting.

  The polyurethane incident made all of this clear. I can tell you the day when our new neighbors moved in to their newly renovated home, because I came up in the elevator behind them, a
nd I saw their shoes out in the hall, as they went to look at the finished renovation, and their lovely varnished floor. They didn’t want to scuff. I am sure that in another context I would find these people tolerable, but in this context, while we were breathing the poison that would allow the husband to have a perfect floor on which to put his baby grand piano, they were extremely hard to like. She worked for a white shoe law firm. He was the CFO at a tech company. They definitely could afford one or both of the neighborhood private schools. Their apartment was probably four times the size of ours, if not more. It was a corner apartment with a view of Prospect Park; ours gave onto the interior and the apartments across from us. And once we began talking to them about compensating us for the weeks we lost in our apartment, it was clear how much they wanted to be rid of the problem that was the couple in the apartment next to them.

  In thinking back on it, I wonder what we might have done differently; I want to try to fix the awful interpersonal stuff, as though it could be fixed. I feel awful, for example, about trying to get Laurel to stay in the apartment the first night, and for underplaying the significance of the toxicity of the smell. I did this in a way that is utterly in character for me. I always underreact at first in a crisis (more depressing examples to come). If a neighbor came running into my apartment with an arm severed but for a single strand of tendon, trailing a pool of blood, I would probably say, Let’s think about this for a second. And then I would help my friend to the couch, and make us both a sandwich. I might do this before getting a tourniquet. This is a quality that Laurel dislikes immensely, I think, though I am putting words in her mouth. Perhaps it is even a quality that I dislike. I suppose I strive for an accurate response to crisis, but in attempting to assess accuracy I inevitably aim low. I don’t want to seem like a complainer. And this probably comes from being told not to complain about my circumstances as a child, because so many people had it worse. I was a child of privilege, so I was to understand my situation in that light.

  It was my underreacting that kept us in the apartment that first night. The only good thing about it was that the bed was tiny, so I had to sleep tightly curled around the wide-awake Laurel. There is almost no time when this is a bad thing. If we were living in caves after the North Korean nuclear assault, and it involved lying next to the warm body of Laurel, I would accept my lot for bringing about this closeness. So: I kept us in the apartment, and this in turn had me sleeping in close quarters with my wife, and I do not regret these moments of intimacy, and how deep they can be, and feel.

  That said, the battle with the neighbors over how to settle the fact of their having polluted us out of our apartment went on for a long time. We suggested an amount in week one, but by week three that amount seemed insignificant, since it didn’t include the dry cleaning, and the utility bill that included running four fans for three weeks, and, for example, the time lost when I had to send my daughter back to her mother’s house. And the longer the battle went on the more we seethed about what bad people they were—like when they said they would apologize as long as we signed a document saying we and our descendants would never sue them. Which we would not and did not sign.

  These were the people living next door to us, understand, in an elevator building, where we were liable to see them (excepting that they worked conventional business hours and we did not) two or three times a day. We could even be waiting with them for the elevator. In awkward silence.

  Because Laurel is a person who will never not say what’s in her heart if she knows it to be true, I knew that there would come an even-more-uncomfortable discussion with this couple. They did, it should be said, apologize in person to us at one point, though the extent of this apology did not impress me, in part because I sort of hate that European IMF-style entitlement, and in part because the apology seemed constructed from a public relations manual. And so the whole thing careened on, with our trying to avoid them, and feeling like we were being edged out of an apartment building that we had enjoyed living in at first.

  It seems it does come down to money and power in the end, and that certain people believe the money and power comes to them legitimately, because of earnings capability, while certain people are embarrassed by their power. Their insurance company gave us $1,200, which was about a quarter of our expenses for the month in which our apartment was difficult to live in, and that they did not budge from that number was a telling illustration of what they thought: that we were making it up, that Laurel in particular was making it up, and that we can’t possibly have been uncomfortable in our apartment for almost three weeks.

  The pregnancy of our neighbor was not a value-neutral aspect of this little moral tale of Park Slope. She was pregnant, and wealthy, and privileged, and we were struggling to conceive, and trying to hang on, according to the shabby gentility that I knew so well, living in an apartment too small for us. We were working artists, adjunct professors, which felt frivolous in the context of a full-on war of public opinion. The other thing that was not value-neutral was that Laurel was (is) a person of mixed race. There were a few African American people in the building, but not many. None on our floor. There was an Asian American couple on the end of the corridor. But the building was exceedingly white. And the husband in that couple next door was Belgian. I have already told you how hard I was on the one European member of my family, my British stepfather.

  It breaks the chronological flow, but let me finish this particular anecdote. So you’ll know from what context I have written what I have written. There was a long, long stalemate about the polyurethane, notwithstanding the $1,200 and the bottle of wine they left for us, neither of whom drinks, and a voucher for a massage, and then they had their baby.

  And the newly minted mother had a mother herself, who must have gotten an apartment in Brooklyn, because suddenly the mother, who resembled the kind of sinewy Carolinian lady that you might read about in a Southern Gothic story, was often in the building pushing the stroller of her grandchild, wearing an expression that clearly said: My daughter has made clear that you people are insane and are trying to take all of her money and I will not be having any conversation with the likes of you. On it went, with Laurel nursing the feeling that she was meant to think she had made it all up, as her poor, struggling mother was dying, and we were planning on leaving the building, because the vibes were so menacing and awful, and then one day I was at the apartment of the guy across the hall from us, the one whose daughter was friendly with my daughter, and suddenly, from the hall I heard yelling.

  I knew instantly what it was. I had known for months that the day would come, and now the day had come. Apparently, Laurel had said to the neighbors just outside the elevator, beside our door: “You know, you never fully compensated us, and I want you to know that I know that to be the case, and I haven’t forgotten.” Which produced a torrent of invective from the Belgian guy, the apex of which included the words Who let people like you into this building? Laurel then really gave it to him, at length, because that’s the way she is, and she resorted to a few zingers, which then encouraged him to intimidate her further, and as he is about a foot and a half taller than Laurel, he backed her up against the wall in the corridor (when they got out of the elevator, that is) and got right up in her face, and really cursed her out, called her a psycho, and his wife shouted from behind him, You made it all up. It’s all in your head, Laurel.

  What I was doing was standing in the apartment of my neighbor, trying to keep my daughter from going out there into the hall, because I was worried about the kids—my daughter and her friend from across the hall—getting caught up in the outrage of the battle. That this was a strategic failure is understatement. I was torn between which person to try to protect, and I should have gone out there and said, Lay off my wife and Shut the fuck up, both of you, but with the emphasis clearly on the fact that the big European knucklehead should return to paying an inhumane wage to Chinese motherboard manufacturers and get out of the business of physically threatening peo
ple. That I did not support Laurel, but chose to try to keep my daughter out of the scuffle, this may have been fruitful for my daughter, but was costly, for a while, in our marriage. There was a cooler-heads apologetic meeting with the neighbors in the hall the next night, where the Belgian guy apologized, said he behaved poorly, and Laurel did her best to walk back her own remarks, and we complained to the co-op board, and the co-op board said, Your problem. We put the apartment on the market.

  That is to say we lost, in this particular struggle. Money and power were victorious. Admittedly, we did well on the apartment sale, and we were secretly a little happy when we heard that the apartment below our neighbors was renovating not too long after, and that this renovation caused some structural damage to the apartment of the Belgian guy and his southern wife.

  That was all months later, but it is the tonal color in this account, acute feelings of having been pushed out of a community, of having been pushed out by people who would find it easy to say the words Who let people like you into this building? And perhaps most importantly there is the legacy of my having failed to support Laurel. What do you do about these things? I tell my daughter that saying you are sorry is the bravest thing you can do, and I am often a person who does it. I feel that I am more often the person who does it with almost every significant relationship in my life. But in marriage it is the best and most honorable way to demonstrate respect. Listen carefully and say you’re sorry.

  June

  Relatedly, school choice is the horrible part of life in Park Slope and of life in New York City, and I could go on and on about school choice, about all the many schools that we looked at during this year, and my hatred, for example, for all the alternative schools, even though I am sure they are excellent. As a person who teaches, I feel I have an especial skill which enables me to look deeply into the soul of an educator who is telling me how excited she is to work with these kids, and to see in this soul massive burnout and barely concealed clinical depression. It was always the alternative schools where I felt this most clearly. There was always a Svengali principal, and then a group of teachers who looked like they could be swinging from a noose.