The Long Accomplishment

by Rick Moody

  The cellist, who was tall and trim and fair-haired and purposeful, kept playing, gorgeously I might add, with lots of open strings, and pregnant silences, and somehow the live quality of the music enabled it to have a mournful impact that I had not always gotten from the music in the hardware store. Same composer, different result. I lay on the floor listening for a while, and then I watched the score for a while, and then I went outside and listened for a while, and at some point while I was doing that I noticed that there was a person burrowing out in the fields just beyond the little hut where the cellist was performing, and that person was, it seemed, photographing the proceedings. She was trying to avoid being seen, but her way of avoiding being seen had the paradoxical quality of helping me feel a little bit less isolated in the tale of my odyssey. It didn’t take that long to realize that she was the same woman who had been harassed by the border agents at the airport the night before.

  In due course, the cellist finished the piece. I’m going to say it was a forty-five-minute solo, and she played it with great and lucid commitment. When she was done, I whispered a few questions to her at first, because the immense stillness, and silence, the intermittent sounds of nature that were the noisy silence of the Canadian plains, at first seemed to suggest that whispering was the reasonable way to go. But the cellist answered aloud some questions about the piece, about how much of the piece was improvised, and so on. She was really patient with me, and she didn’t realize how desperate I was for conversation right then. I would have gladly taken her for dinner in whatever backwater we were near, just to hear her talk about her food allergies, or her trouble as a child with long division. But after five or ten minutes she said that she was going to leave me alone now, and she packed up her cello and walked off. Back the way I had come, through the field, to the dusty dead end of the road down which I had traveled.

  I assumed that the photographer was still out in the field, but in the meantime there was only myself and the vast, barely disturbed expanses of Saskatchewan for another hour or so. This was like my regular life in no way at all. And, on paper, it was everything I wanted and couldn’t have in my ordinary life—no playing with paper dolls with my daughter, no divorce meetings with the lawyers, no writing student recommendations, no bills to pay, no civilization to get in the way of the spiritual growth that I believe I wanted and from which I was frequently cut off by the responsibilities of the day—and yet though it was everything I felt I wanted, the last hour and a half of it felt demanding, even beyond my capabilities. Maybe Abe Burickson, who spent years learning how to perform a Sufi spin, would have known how to fill the two hours of prairie, but I somehow could not do it, and I couldn’t shake a nagging perception of failure, as if a dozen people had volunteered time and energy to give me this feeling that my life was significant, but coming 2,000 miles somehow did not make me less insecure.

  When my time was up, I hiked out, and a driver met me there, and took me back to the airport. I think he was the romantic partner of the cellist, or at least he knew the cellist. How Abe Burickson (who, I found out later, had never been to Saskatchewan, and still has not been) had selected this place, these people, this cellist, etc., for this part of my odyssey, I never quite found out. Only that once upon a time, when I was fifty-two years old, I was kidnapped by a bunch of actors and transported to one of the most empty places in North America, and it was incredibly beautiful.

  I made it back in one piece.

  The end of the odyssey, just so that you know, had to do with taking me out to Sandy Hook, New Jersey, and then bringing me back the following morning, in the company, at various points, of nearly every one of my dearest friends. It was delightful. But the very last scene involved seeing my mother waiting for me on a park bench in Soho, all by herself. Seeing her there was forlorn and sentimental, perhaps she was forlorn, or, more likely, she just had no idea what this theatrical thing was, and what she was meant to be doing. But she rode back with me on the subway, until we arrived in Park Slope, whereupon I came up from underground to find Laurel and Hazel awaiting me. After the on-and-off three months of strange, uncanny occurrences, in ever-increasing frequency, it was easy to see this last bit as a ratification of home, the idea of home, exactly like in Homer’s Odyssey, where one returns home after ten years of traumatic adventures. What was important was being present for it, being present for the moments of being, and the turning away from adventure in the safe harbor of home.

  Just before the last part of the odyssey, though also in the summer before the autumn in which Laurel and I married, one other very memorable event came to pass, namely our joint in-flight magazine travel piece about Ireland. This was right after I proposed to Laurel in Cannon Beach, Oregon. Laurel was very interested in the ring portion of the marriage proposal. Early in the process of agreeing to marry, she was bidding on used engagement rings from the turn of the last century, for an art project, until she had a great number of them, all bought on the cheap, and she liked to take them all out and look at them on the bed, and evaluate the bands and the stones and the settings. We found a ring in Millerton, New York, one I liked a bit, one that passed muster, and I sort of filed it away as the ring I would use when I proposed. There was no real mystery to any of this, like there is no mystery about the advent of the first perfect day of spring, and so she knew I would propose someday, and I knew I would propose, and we already knew more or less how the words would go.

  I put the ring from Millerton, the one I liked, from the store next to the good diner in Millerton, in my suitcase, and we headed out to Cannon Beach. As usual, there, we didn’t have that much time, just a couple of days, and there would be a lot of family around. Laurel’s dad’s house is just a couple of blocks off the beach, on a street heavily lined with summer cottages (and with signs marked “Tsunami Evacuation Route”), but lovely and quiet just the same. As with a lot of the Pacific Northwest, the tides are dramatic, and whole rivers and inlets are made and erased in the six hours between high and low tides, and we were always watching for the lowest of the low, because then you could get the farthest out toward Haystack Rock, where the swirling disturbances of gulls and terns above were nearest at hand. There were little sandbars, and heavily barnacled rocks, all of them looking like they were designed by some Hollywood backdrop painter with a flair for the dramatic, and that was where I wanted to do the asking that I was going to do. If, in a way, the purpose of the Odyssey Works odyssey that spring and summer was to restore a sense of purpose and meaning to some months that had become intensely painful and joyless, having a little bit of occasion about this moment, not overdramatizing it, but understanding it to be of this place, this beach, among this family, Laurel’s family, was important to me, buoyed up on the rippling of the chilly Pacific.

  We crossed the main drag, and went down toward the beach, and I suppose I was silent, with some kind of intentionality, not dramatizing, and Laurel asked what I was thinking about and I said something noncommittal, and then she looked down at my hands, which were in my pockets, and Laurel says that she noticed there was something large in my hand, a box in my pocket, and she knew, instantly, she says, what was in my pocket, that is to say the little jewelry case that hid the ring from view. Laurel broke into some sudden rush of excitement and laughter, all done without any words at all.

  The Pacific crashing down upon the enormous foggy microclimates of Cannon Beach, in which pedestrians (and their dogs) or riders on their recumbent bikes, emerged from backdrops of sfumato, and then disappeared back into them, notwithstanding that it was actually sort of a sunny day, and so forth, this was the day. And so we hiked down across the beach toward the rock, and the rock, as with all large-scale geological formulations in the West, seemed to recede the closer that you got to it, so that it was both near and far at the same. Over the years, I had made as to seem impervious to the cold of the Pacific. I had been dared to swim in it, and I had swum in it, so the waves were no matter to me, nor were the eddies around Haystack Rock,
and so I took her down by the hand, and when we were near unto the rock, I knelt in the water, and she knew I was going to do it because I had to take the ring out of the box, of course, and I just mumbled what was the obvious, without wanting to get all Bachelor Nation about the whole thing,

  Hey, Peaches, what do you say we get hitched and spend the rest of our lives together?

  She said, Sure.

  And then off we went to Ireland.

  Three nights on the Aran Islands, one night on each, and in each the desolation and antiquity of the islands, their absence of vegetation, the ornate, nearly baroque complexity of the stone walls that subdivided up tiny immemorial plots of the islands for grazing, mostly unused at this point, the tiny fishing villages. The lingering shadow, like some whiff of an eclipse, that was the primeval Hibernian land of clans and warlords, the good-humored Celtic mythology, it was ever present. It was hard not to get brilliant photographs. But it was Inishmaan, the middle island, that had the most impact. We stayed, while there, in a sort of souped-up brutalist cuisine destination lodging, which was about as much characteristic of the Aran Islands as a chicken farm would be in Beverly Hills, and though it didn’t have the word folly in the title, it should have, and the fact that our room was paid for by a council on Irish tourism made the proprietor dislike us somehow, us rich entitled Yanks. But how invalid were we, in wanting to come here to this land, for a mere span of days, to learn something about our Irish heritage in the Gaeltacht? That some coward a hundred or more years ago couldn’t live through a bit of a potato famine and shipped off for New York City, leaving behind his poor and meager family, failing to send back American currency now and again, was that our responsibility? Was he not still Irish? And here we were back again wanting to take a few photos of the locals, and yet not willing, by virtue of congenital alcoholism, to go to the pub, did that make us less Irish?

  Look, the whole mystique of the Aran Islands, an exporter of Irish speakers to the Irish mainland for more than a hundred years, is owing to one writer, really, and that writer was J. M. Synge, the playwright of The Playboy of the Western World, who first came to the Aran Islands to perfect his Irish in the mid-1890s (after his first attack of Hodgkin’s disease), and then every summer thereafter for five years, he stayed mainly in Inishmaan, in a little cottage, where there is a sort of J. M. Synge historic tour that you can take. It’s sort of the only thing to do on the island, by way of an official tour (unless you want to see the sweater factory, which we did too). There’s a woman whose family owned the Synge cottage after Synge did, and she gives you the whole spiel and points to the fireplace that he used, and maybe that’s the bedpan that he used, and so on, and because I had been reading the very extraordinary Aran Islands by J. M. Synge on the trip over, I was very interested in all of this local detail, but, in truth, it was a tiny little cottage in which no more than six or seven could comfortably sit and be lectured, and it was hard for me to believe that the vast majority of Irish or European visitors (most of whom went to Inishmore, the big island, and called it a day) felt that the lecture at Synge’s cottage, however well-meaning, was much more than the tourism equivalent of cod liver oil. We stayed till the end, and I introduced myself to the lady who did the lecturing, who was very kind, and who, I think, mainly came back to do the tours in the pleasant part of summer, and it was she who told us that Synge actually had a sort of an aerie up on the cliffs; Corough, I think the area is called, from which you could see, across a turbulent strait of water, Inishmore, next over, and there Synge betook himself to work, presumably on days that were fair enough, and no one bothered him at all. This I can assure you was true. No one bothered you on Inishmaan at all, anywhere, but especially not on the aerie of J. M. Synge, a sort of limestone throne, surrounded all around by loose rock and the thunderous assault of waves, and nothing else, nor man nor beast.

  The lady at the cottage further alerted us that from there you could walk down the coastline of Inishmaan, to the completely unsettled far end of Inishmaan, and you could find at the end of the island, where the limestone was most pitted by the eroding action of saltwater and nonstop rain and dispiriting temperatures, blowholes in terraces of rock there, through which, if the ocean cooperated, there would be these geysers. You didn’t have to tell me about this twice.

  All the best places I have seen in the world—Iceland, the Southern Alps of New Zealand, the Four Corners of the Southwest, Marfa, Texas, the farthest-out coast of Maine, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, Wyoming, the Sonoran Desert—have been places that have the fewest marks of civilized humankind, and most geological activity, but the irony is that I never feel like I have truly seen them if unaccompanied. I need my desolation to be experienced in tandem, which is to say, I suppose, that desolation is a thing best experienced in love. It’s too bad about J. M. Synge having to go up on the cliffs by himself every day. I was much more glad that I had a confederate in Laurel, a fellow adventurer, and the farther out we walked, and the more we wended around completely unfenced cliffsides, the more we watched the restless waves lash the edges of Inishmaan, the more I loved doing it with Laurel. We had been through a lot trying to get our Irish trip to cohere with what we imagined a travel magazine would want of our trip, and now, in walking away from the chic gastronomical resort, we were avoiding our professional responsibilities, and getting, instead, in the very limestone of Inishmaan, not only the true story of Ireland, its Irish and Celtic stony despair, but also a founding moment for our upcoming marriage, this trip into unspoiled perfection.

  It was hard to know, from a distance, if you had really seen a blowhole, because there was no sign that said blowhole this way, in either Irish or English. Nor were there any roads, down which the cottage lady might have directed us. No, the directions were something like, Go all the way down to the southernmost end and there are some blowholes down there. The accent sort of made the word blowhole difficult to evaluate at first. It sounded almost prurient. But we made this long journey, and every so often, a half a mile ahead, or so, we’d see a pair of Norwegians, let’s say, with backpacks, who had also decided that Inishmore, the big island, was too easy, and they wanted to know where the real Ireland was.

  I cannot exactly describe the blowhole phenomenon in a way that will do it complete justice (inexpressibility!), because what this kind of odyssey is is to a place that’s without language, in the sense that, like Abe Burickson pursuing his dervishing in Istanbul, if you can call it by a name, it’s not exactly a complete spiritual experience, but upon the southerly plain of Inishmaan, a tiny island to the west of Éire, where they still speak a beautiful old language with a lot of silent consonants, there is a spot where the very fabric of the island itself merges with the waves, in the sense that the waves and land become one undulation of the material world, a mutual interdependence; the wave travels up against the coast, and then it disappears into the mottled limestone, and, at a completely different spot, suddenly there erupts another convulsion of saltwater, and it’s not that it’s as grand as Geysir in Iceland, or any such phenomena in the Rocky Mountains, that’s not what’s perfect about it, it’s not that it must be for such a vast majority of the year unobserved. It’s that the sea and the islands are heedless of Ireland and all of its heartbroken history, its violent convulsions of independence, its frequently conservative religious ideals, its small-town enmities, its alcoholism, its big-hearted bonhomie, its hospitality, its unparalleled enthusiasm, its capacity for mourning, and its music. The sea and the islands don’t give a shit about Ireland, or about American tourists, their action is far too ancient and regular for all of that, and for a split second, on a blustery, perfect, and sun-dappled day, I got to see that with the woman who was shortly going to be my wife, to watch it, to watch it again, to watch it reproduce its immemorial show, in a way that would still be happening long after we were here to watch.

  These are among the memories that we tell, and retell, sometimes altering them perhaps, sometimes doing our best to cl
ear away the artifice and leave them as close to the truth as we can get them, each of us sometimes wanting to be the weaver of tales, each of us occasionally letting the other do the work. Stories are the thing, sometimes, that distracts, and leavens, and mollifies, and comforts. Maybe in this way the marriage is created by the stories, rather than the stories being created by the marriage. Maybe there is no marriage until there are the stories of the marriage, an agreement about what are the narrative contents of the marriage, what are the valuable tales, rich in laughter and sobbing, which reflect and construct the participants of the marriage, define them in relationship to one another. If you can’t tell of a marriage, it doesn’t yet exist.

  September 2014

  We hadn’t even paid for one IVF cycle, and we were already in the red, just for all the testing and the medication for Laurel’s IUI cycles, and we had been looking at various new clinics, and we knew that unreimbursed IVF cycles were many, many thousands of dollars, it was going to become astronomically more difficult to pay thereafter, with the later cycles.

  Neither of us had the money.

  I decided that I would inquire into whether my father would help us fund the first IVF cycle.

  It would probably take an entire book to detail in full why I dislike asking my father, or anyone else, for monetary gifts, so you will simply have to believe me when I say that it’s up there on the list with calling the Internal Revenue Service, or defending religion from its critics. Were I to say that I simply like standing on my own feet, that I have done so since I left my full-time publishing job in 1991, I would be understating the intensity of my feeling. I don’t want anybody feeling like they can call the tune. I don’t like being patronized. I don’t like owing people favors, I like the feeling that I somehow figured out how to get by without help, even if I only just got by. In the later nineties, when a certain muckraker liked to publish gossip items about how I was just a rich banker’s son, I never bothered to point out just how underfunded, just how barren was the larder, at the home of the rich banker’s son; the enmities of class are a thing that keeps people sharp, and protesting about them has never won a child of privilege a single ally.