The Long Accomplishment

by Rick Moody

  There is one very good public school in Park Slope, and my daughter was granted a spot, because of our address, and it was one reason we stayed and took the abuse from the neighbors. People have suffered worse to get their kids into PS321 of Park Slope. People have feigned addresses, they have borrowed the addresses of relatives and friends, they have used former addresses. They have moved to Park Slope simply to get into the school district, and so on. Of the four contemporaneous girls in our building, only two went to PS321, and though Hazel, my daughter, was granted her spot, her mother refused to allow her to go there, because she seemed, as I understand it, to find the school elitist. The conflicting opinions among the adults of Hazel’s life about schools could fill a long tedious pamphlet entitled “On Co-Parenting,” which would probably be on display at some of the storefronts of Park Slope, and I for one am not going to contribute more material to the pamphlet and will say simply that Hazel was also accepted into a gifted and talented program in Astoria, Queens, about an hour from Park Slope by train, and in June we learned that this would be her school.

  There are the moments in life when you know change is about to assert itself, and that, in the main, you are unprepared, but that doesn’t mean you can’t ride the steed of change in the correct direction. Hazel going to school in Queens presented this entirely different idea about how to live in New York, and the idea was: Why not live in Queens? Besides going to the airport, and besides knowing that Mayor John Lindsay once ineffectively plowed the borough of Queens after a blizzard, and besides knowing that it had a reputation for being the most diverse of the five boroughs (sixty languages are spoken in the Queens public school system, I have heard it said), I knew not much about Queens. I suppose I was a Manhattan snob when it was easy, and then I was a Brooklyn snob when it was easy, and in each of these periods of my life, looking down on Queens seemed routine. Queens could scarcely defend itself.

  But here we were thinking about where we would live, after we sold the apartment in the co-op building in Park Slope, and it seemed like maybe we would live in Queens. (Especially when we found out how long Hazel’s commute was going to be. An hour, one way. To kindergarten.)

  That Hazel got into the citywide gifted and talented program was therefore really good news, in that she could be in the public school system, which I believed in, and still believe in, and she got into the most permissive one, because it was brand-new, and she was going to be in an incredibly diverse school district. But ultimately we were going to have to think about moving to Queens, and that was going to be the way out of Park Slope.

  Meanwhile, we went back for another round of IUI at the clinic on the Upper East Side, where there were now a lot of health insurance problems. The endocrinologist told us she would honor our insurance through the cycle, but didn’t tell her associates in the front office, and at every stage we had to sort of beg for the arrangement to be as it was initially described. We could feel the business relationship on the verge of breaking apart. Which implied: finding a new clinic. However, we had the IUI scheduled, and once you schedule it, and go through the difficulty of preparing, you want to finish it up without having to interrupt care. In the treatment of infertility, every month counts, especially when the prospective mother is, as they say, of “advanced maternal age,” which is to say in her mid-thirties or several years beyond, as Laurel was.

  So I was going back into the closet in the basement, after the first IUI, which came to nothing, which was a big flop, and I was meant to produce more genetic material. The second time was not as awful as the first, unless you thought about it. Upon thinking about it, the second time, in its way, became far worse, because it was about normalizing this activity, the furtive medically approved spilling out of your double helixes into a little plastic cup with your name and signature on it. The signature part was particularly odd (though it should be obvious why it is a feature—so you don’t get a rogue employee mixing up the samples, or, say, introducing his own into the plastic cup), and made the providing of the genetic material eerily similar to signing a book for a reader. Once you thought about it, you were sort of doomed. Self-consciousness of any kind could arguably result in die-off of the good sperm, or could create more of the two-headed ones. It had come to pass, though, back in March, that there was the sudden vitamin enhancement of my daily life, including the fish oil ones. I took a fistful of the various sperm count enhancers every morning, frequently gagging, and well aware from accounts online that a significant portion of men, husbands, partners, made a line in the sand and said: I’m not taking your fucking vitamins. By which they meant: I am uncomfortable about the child, or I am uncomfortable about our relationship, or I am uncomfortable about medicalizing our free and easy sex life, or I am uncomfortable about not being in control of this process, or I am uncomfortable that in the postmodern now being masculine means all of these things, means being uncomfortable, about all of the above. Treatment for infertility entails giving up one thing after another in the process, both little things and exceedingly large things, for both partners. For men, it’s not impossible to feel that you are a shrunken vessel of the past, an atavistic biological entity, a series of codes to be mined for the project, who galumphs after the mother into this appointment and that appointment, easily replaced with technological devices and some frozen sperm if necessary, and there are many opportunities for depersonalization, unless you take a big step outside, and, for example, look for the capacity to support.

  At the second IUI, we were still hopeful.

  Laurel has a really amazing smile, which is something every married person should feel about her or his spouse, a billboard of a smile, a rose garden of a smile, a sunrise of a smile, and, like her mother, a completely unrestrained laugh, which, when really set off through some organic means, can gather force, and occasionally through this year, we lost track of the capacity to find that part of our conjoined lives, if only because of sorrow piled upon sorrow, and yet at each new episode of infertility treatment, we worked to muster some hope; I would find myself at her bedside hoping that maybe some good would come of all this. In particular, with IUI, the medical people go away for a while and centrifuge the sperm, and there’s a moment therefore where a couple might take stock of where that couple is, and so we did that, amid all the swirling of difficulties, together in our struggle.

  And in the days after the procedure, because Laurel had become an adept with pregnancy tests, and would use two or three different ones, the cheap ones and the less cheap ones, and knew exactly what the results looked like, and could look at even the faintest trace of a positive, more a ghost of a positive than a positive, a line signaling through a dense fog of grim outcomes, a faintest figure of a line, a hope of a line, we knew pretty quickly that something amazing had happened, namely good news.

  Bear in mind that this was all going on in the midst of two lives that were pretending, in a way, that no pregnancy was coming, no child, and we were pursuing our professional ambitions as though we were younger and more heedless, and everywhere around us there was death and chaos. As noted, Laurel had been crisscrossing the nation on her DNA portrait project, and I was teaching and ferrying my daughter back and forth from day care on the days when she was with us, and trying to get the new novel off the ground, and there was no room for error. If a long-term plan didn’t work, we didn’t have time to grieve, really, nor room for it. There was too much to do.

  And that’s why the good news was sort of unfathomable. You build up a hard outer shell, and I know when I say this that there are people who have suffered far more than we have suffered, even among our friends, couples who lost pregnancies at twenty weeks, or had to terminate because of genetic problems or grave illnesses. The hard exterior can be a lot harder than ours was, but ours was plenty bad enough. To have a little good news, however unbelievable, was so good that we mostly stowed it away for the time being, allowing ourselves into the castle of familial dreams for only very short visits. We didn’t purchase the
crib.

  This was about when my online friend M.J. took her life. As I say, I had known a number of suicides, for example, my friend Lucy Grealy, and my friend David Foster Wallace, and I expect I will know more. The really sad people are sometimes the very best writers. If there were a way to go back and prevent the suicide, you say to yourself, while acknowledging the faults in the logic. On my first real date with Laurel, as I’ve said, we had seen Avatar together, a truly execrable film, in my view, a true dog, and out of boredom perhaps, I forgot that maybe I wasn’t supposed to hold Laurel’s hand at that film, and so I did it without really thinking, it was just two hands behaving as hands are to behave, given enough time. I think people should hold hands all the time. I am given to lamenting the possibility that my daughter will no longer want to hold my hand; I think about it a lot. That I do not want her to stop wanting to hold my hand. Though parenting is a recognition that the day will come, and the child will no longer want to hold your hand, and will make some kind of joke about it, and that joke is the indication that you have done your job really well. I am not ready for that day yet, because I think people should hold hands all the time.

  Somewhere on the web I saw a video of a chimp who had been held alone in a cage for a long time, I can’t remember how long, some years, I believe, and then one day they decided to put another chimp in the cage with the chimp in solitary confinement, and you can see, in fact, and I don’t believe I am imagining it, the astonished joy of the chimp in solitary confinement, and what he or she does is reach out her hand for the other chimp, whom she has not ever met, simply to hold that chimp’s hand, and often Laurel and I, in a bad patch, will do an imitation of the chimp handhold, a handhold without opposable thumbs; we imitate the chimps, by which we mean that sometimes the handholding is sufficient, and if I could do it again, and go back in time, maybe I could persuade M.J. otherwise, maybe I could somehow prevent what she had done, or at least demonstrate that I personally was no threat, was just some slightly desperate guy trying to hang on and do his job now and again. I would just try to sell her on the handholding as a treatment model.

  For the sake of the argument, let’s say that we were doing the chimpanzee handholding when Laurel had the first beta pregnancy test and confirmed a heartbeat! Confirmed a heartbeat! Confirmed a heartbeat! We had never gotten to a heartbeat before, in all of our laborious efforts, and now we had a heartbeat! The endocrinologist was not exactly overcome with joy about it, but we had a heartbeat, and that was the main thing. Because I will never disbelieve a bit of good news if there is no reason to disbelieve. This was one of the days in which I began to see that our bad luck with conceiving had visited on the normally upbeat Laurel a kind of posttraumatic stress, in which she could not believe, not without air-tight reassurance that was multiply deduced in different ways and from different angles. She kept asking the endocrinologist about the heartbeat, was it the right kind of heartbeat, and, after the MD left, she kept asking if I noticed anything out of the ordinary in our treatment that day. To which I said, no, of course not, because I still wanted to believe.

  There was the issue that we were going to get kicked out of the MD’s practice, because she no longer took our insurance. Laurel was convinced there was bad luck just around the corner. We would have to wait ten days for the next scan to find out.

  July 2014

  It was the dog days, and we were heading back to Skidmore College, where I have taught for a couple of weeks each summer for so long now that I can’t remember when I didn’t. Perhaps it’s two decades now. This was the first summer that Laurel got a legitimate ID card and cafeteria privileges. Such privileges retroactively confer monogamy on you, you know. In years prior she had always been denied the free meals because of our not being joined together in the eyes of the law. Somehow this came to be a feeling that we were used to, a feeling of constrained legitimacy, a feeling of being a team against the vast and immobile outside world. This year was different, therefore: we could eat soft ice cream from the Skidmore College cafeteria at every meal if we wanted to, and no one could stop us—we were married.

  I take pride in professionalism. I am willing to do things that other people find ridiculous if I have agreed to appear at a certain festival or school. Once I say yes I don’t do otherwise. I will drive four hours to teach a class and then turn around and drive straight home. Those stories of the really famous writers in which a college buys a house in town for this newly hired writer and then he simply uses that house as leverage for or against some other school, these seem like dreams to me, Scheherazade-like folkloric exaggerations. Even the time I got a vile skin condition in the now-demolished old dorms at Skidmore I tried to say nothing for as long as possible. Once, on the way to Skidmore, I knocked out most of a tooth getting into my car, and instead of panicking I drove up, taught my first class, drove down to my dentist in the city, capped the tooth, and then went back up to Skidmore. I will work under bad circumstances, and I will feel virtuous. Laurel sometimes puts it this way: Rick likes it when it sucks. I can’t address the origin of this particular way of being, the professionalism just is. It makes it easier for me to wake up in the morning, because I know what I have to do.

  Similarly, in July, we had to drive up to Saratoga Springs, and drive back to the city the next day for our second pregnancy scan, and on the trip back, Laurel was sure that we were facing bad news, maybe just because we had gotten used to bad news. Lately, the precipice of good news was the most worrisome place of all. I would have to find a way to read stories for class on Tuesday sometime after the long drive and the trip to the endocrinologist. Not to mention there was a wealth of ancillary responsibilities at my summer program at Skidmore, dinners every night, and readings after the dinners, and tutorials with each student. It was a whole community, which was part of why I went back year after year. It was my one chance each year to have a good chat with the poet Henri Cole, whom I greatly admire, and, in those days, to hear Mark Strand read. I think hearing Mark Strand read his essay “On Nothing,” which may have been this summer, was one of the most important moments I have ever had at a summer writing conference. Strand was already ill, as I recall it, but he managed perfect comic timing, despite his illness: “I have no subject for this talk, no subject except nothing, which is both a subject and not a subject.” These were part of our life in Saratoga Springs in July, and we had to try to do our best to participate, no matter the hardship.

  In the office of that Upper East Side reproductive endocrinologist, the dread was a feature like the wallpaper was a feature. The dread that was on a lot of faces in the waiting room, lots of women, lots of them with extremely bad news to come. Nobody goes for doctor-assisted reproduction without a problem. No amount of wait-and-see optimism could paper over the dread, and the up-tempo “mellow rock” station in the waiting room could do nothing to help us either.

  Laurel lay on the table, therefore, when it was her time, and the reproductive endocrinologist and her assistant went about trying to find the baby, which they had managed to find just two weeks before, and then they started attempting to locate the baby’s heartbeat, and there were a lot of silences, and the silences were a perfect setting for the accumulation of dread, and though I can often feel like the sound of HVAC is the sound of God, that day the silences were an oppression, each more garish as it extended around us. Say something! Say something! The seconds ticked past, unremarked upon, and every moment brought its gymnastics of certainty and uncertainty. The dread as oppressive as the air quality of Manhattan in the summer months, waiting for the pronouncement, with the waiting, after a point, hoping against the pronouncement, knowing that it was going to be bad, and back into the gymnastics and hoping otherwise. So now you know that our good news had become bad news, and the embryo had not grown since the last exam, in fact, the “embie,” as Laurel’s online fertility community called them, was less robust than it had been before, and that meant that there was a problem, and the particular problem was no feta
l heartbeat, and, said the RE, we should not consider this a pregnancy that was going to progress. And in fact the products of conception would now have to be removed.

  If we were going to try again.

  As I have said, I know Laurel well enough to know when she is dissembling, for the sake of social requirements, or I know that the face of real hopelessness is not a face that is made available for the world immediately, but needs rumination, needs a gathering of force, while the mind whittles away the possibilities for hope, and finding none, gives up. Laurel was not about to betray these inner workings at the office of the reproductive endocrinologist.

  Once we got out the door she was absolutely distraught.

  And how can one be the husband of the mother who has just lost her child and still somehow not know, not feel, exactly, what your wife feels, what a mother feels? Why wasn’t there some mechanism so that we could know exactly, so that we could take on some of the disconsolation and thereby help? Why always this philosophical distance, the masculine difference, a gulf of recognition, that to know what a mother feels is impossible for all of those who have never been mothers and who will never be mothers? Laurel and I came to know a woman who lost a child (much further along in her pregnancy) and had to terminate, to safeguard her own life, and who was then told by her employer that she could not have maternity leave, because her child had died, and thus was never born, and thus, according to her employer, she was never a mother. That the truth was otherwise was unmistakable in the agony she went through in the aftermath. We have felt her pain, I have felt her pain, and feel it still. So how to pierce through this feeling that was the insulation against feelings, that was the feeling of covering up from further blows, so as to hold the hand of a weeping woman, with tears of rage, and tears of abject loss, how to get through with the dead part of the self to the part of the self that wants to help? Why so much easier just to walk down the Manhattan streets belittled by scale and glamorous emptiness, just waiting, waiting for something more, some undeniable good?