The Long Accomplishment

by Rick Moody

  Faced with the police, I even wondered if my ex-wife wished me harm in this way (unlikely!), and then there were the various affairs, and there were the various husbands and/or partners of other people with whom I had been involved. I could imagine any of them wanting to see me this morning, this Tuesday morning, looking at the sheen of water over the mangled and upended manuscripts in my office. And who could blame them? Then I had also written a long piece about a friend preoccupied justifiably with threats he had received (from a former pal, now estranged), and this piece had also attacked another writer at great length, and taken a firm stand on some literary injustices I had perceived. Such stories crawled up and out of the sewage of memory.

  But once you go down into the spiral labeled “vendetta” it is hard to return, and as my experience of depression in my twenties was of just this kind of compulsive thinking, this self-hatred meted out relentlessly, I didn’t really want to allow myself to go there, and, anyway, I didn’t think it fit the facts. The facts were that someone was watching our house, and to do so they must have been nearby, and if they were nearby it was likely I didn’t know them well.

  Because how did they know when it was safe to go back for their second visit, having seen the house swarming with police, unless they were watching the house and had a firm grasp on our comings and goings? How did they know? The only explanation was that one or more participants in the burglary lived close enough to us to know that we weren’t there all the time, and that, in particular, we hadn’t been there since the police secured the premises early Monday morning. That implied that they lived just down the hill, and may have been there, at home, that very Tuesday morning, as the cops went about their business again, and the insurance company adjustor arrived, and began taking a look around. He wasn’t allowed there until the police left, so he sat in his car for a while, went out for a sandwich and came back.

  Laurel, that morning, began to try to go through her things, and what she found, as you might imagine, was that every single piece of jewelry in the household was gone. There were a number of pieces of jewelry among my things (all concealed in the sock drawer in my dresser, so let me use the bullhorn of publication right now for a public service announcement: don’t put your jewelry in the sock drawer), including my grandfather’s watch, the crucifix that my late sister wore at her baptism, and some other small items that were going to be given to my daughter, and perhaps a niece or nephew. But my collection of jewelry was nothing when compared to Laurel’s.

  As I’ve said, when we were engaged, before our marriage, Laurel went through a long period of trying to collect antique rings for an art project. As a result many weeks passed in which we went to jewelry stores both new and used, all around the Hudson Valley and in New York City, looking at rings. The ring I used to propose to her with in Oregon (now stolen, probably already pawned and melted down) was among these rings.

  And all of these rings were gone. In place of the rings were a whole lot of empty jewelry boxes strewn across the floor of her office. Because no one wants used engagement rings (or this is the commonplace thinking) these rings would almost certainly be melted down after the seventy-two-hour waiting period at the pawn shop, if we didn’t find them immediately. They did constitute a very large collection of engagement rings, which Laurel had wanted to preserve from being melted or lost, only to have them either melted or lost, or both.

  For me, the loss of the ring I’d used to propose with was a deep wound, and, frankly, it hasn’t entirely healed even now. It’s the same with my sister’s crucifix. There are moments like this, when the rage that comes with losing these things is powerful, and all you can think of is what aspect of vigilantism would appeal if you could have the guy who performed the robbery in the room with you. Laurel, as a person who will always tell her side of the story in no uncertain terms, is better at it than I am, but what I’d like to tell the guy is these stories, these love stories, these stories of hardship. Perhaps these pages can be a beginning.

  I had four guitars upstate in those days. A Taylor twelve-string, a Mexican-made Fender Telecaster, an acoustic six-string that Laurel’s brother had picked out for me, and a Padron three-string cigar-box guitar. These were all gone. Because it is important to give the context to these things, I want to tell you about my Telecaster. The Telecaster had a real tuning issue, especially on the B string. I think the neck warped slightly when I lived on Fishers Island. The climate there was humid and salty, and it destroyed a lot of things—appliances, for example. I think the neck warped there from too much humidity. So the Telecaster, which was burgundy with a white pick guard, was nobody’s idea of a good electric guitar. And yet it was my electric guitar. I bought it in the mid-nineties when I had my first substantial book advance, and I had to go to Manny’s in Midtown to get it, with a friend of my brother’s who was knowledgeable about these things (I think he liked the Fender Jaguar better). Manny’s, as any aspiring musician will tell you, was in those days a daunting experience. There were always a bunch of guys standing around playing faultless imitations of Yngwie Malmsteen, while the sales staff ignored anyone without rock star credentials. It took me a long time to get anyone to pay attention to my desire to pay for the Mexican Telecaster, and they also tried to dissuade me from buying the distortion box and the wah pedal because, as a particularly bored salesperson told me, good guitar players don’t need all those pedals.

  I am not now, nor was I then, a good guitar player. Nor am I particularly good at playing anything else, any other instrument. But I never played in order to do much beyond make myself, and a few collaborators, happy, and the Telecaster, chosen in part for its comeliness, was an example of this. Other people buy cars with a first book advance, or they renovate a kitchen. I bought a guitar, for $450, and put the rest in a savings account.

  That guitar traveled a long way with me after that. I played a few gigs with it. I remember playing it at a Bennington College event with my friend Syd Straw one time. I played it at a Tin House benefit one night, and sang “For the Turnstiles,” by Neil Young. I had lived with it for twenty years, by the time it was stolen from the house. Ironically, the one guitar of mine that I passionately disliked, my Taylor six-string cutaway with onboard pickup for electrification, which was very difficult to play, because the action was too high, was not stolen, for the simple reason that it was in Brooklyn at the time. I sort of wished that one had been stolen.

  By the time we had called the emergency contractors suggested to us by the insurance company, who had to come demo the basement and put in new drywall; by the time we had dragged all the wet carpets out onto the lawn, and set about packing up the three thousand books in the basement; by the time we had begun to itemize the lost jewelry, all of which we did on the occasional afternoon junket in which we drove upstate and turned around and drove back down before the sun went over the hills, by the time we had accomplished all of this, the horror had truly set in. The kind of permanent changes to a worldview that come with calamity. Laurel plans for the worst, but really believes that the best is liable to happen, and when the opposite is the outcome, when the planning for the worst turns out to be the right approach, she becomes deeply upset, in a way that seems to involve the very core of her. Laurel had no intention of sleeping in our house ever again, the house where we had been married.

  I was experiencing feelings of rage. I was fine with being in the house. The police suggested to us that once a house was robbed, in our case twice, and depleted of all of its valuables, it was understood in the criminal demimonde to be “used up.” This is how they put it. I didn’t think anyone was going to come again. But what I did think was that I really wanted to apprehend the guys who had done it, preferably in front of a jury, and tell them what it felt like. I wanted them to have that experience.

  We were then assigned a detective, from Poughkeepsie. It was really hard to tell who was who and from what jurisdiction, but we collaborated on processing the break-ins with this guy from Poughkeepsie, a
nd he was a little bit like that deputy marshall Sam McCloud of television infamy, offhandedly warm and unassuming. And he went over and over the story with us, and we told him what we knew over and over. He put a deer cam in the tree by the driveway, so that we could see anyone coming up the driveway, and he helped us affix a bike lock on the French door so that it would be inoperable from the outside. And he told us that they had a lead, in that there had been several other houses robbed in the area, and they had picked up a guy for one of these robberies. Apparently, in one of the other cases, a house only a few miles away, an ATV had been stolen. And then just a few days later, the police spotted a guy riding around town on an ATV. They gave chase.

  That guy was locked up.

  As the detective said, the goal was to prove somehow that this guy, the automotive enthusiast, had also committed the robbery on our house.

  In the weeks that followed the robberies at our house, Laurel and I, when we weren’t managing repairs and alarm installation from a distance, were using all of the internet tools at our disposal to attempt to figure out who was involved, where our stuff was, and what we could do about it.

  It would not be inaccurate to say that my beloved spouse is an extremely good law enforcement volunteer. The kinds of skills that would make her good are integral to her work. Or, to put it another way, detail-oriented thinking is how Laurel does what she does, and during the period when she turned her detail-obsessed thinking on the two guys, barely into their twenties, who robbed our house, she turned up many, many more leads than we ever got or heard about from the detective assigned to our case. Conversations with the detective usually involved information going in one direction primarily: from Laurel to the detective, not vice versa.

  For example, as I had been warned to expect by friends, my guitars very quickly turned up on eBay. They were being offered by a guy who had apparently bought them from a certain pawnshop in New Milford, Connecticut. Because he had bought them from the pawnshop, however, he had no obligation to return them to me. And because he had the Telecaster and the twelve-string, each of them with small problems, it was hard to conclude that I needed to pay to have them back, which is how this worked. Similarly, we concluded that the jewelry had been sold to the same pawn shop in New Milford, and that it was already melted down. Because they are only obliged to put a hold on jewelry for three days.

  Assembling all of these threads of narrative—the arrest of the dirt bike enthusiast, the names of all the neighbors living down the hill from us, a few tidbits from the detective—in short order we knew the name of the guy who all but certainly had robbed our house and several other houses in the area. Of course, if the detective had just served a warrant to examine his collection of work boots, and matched them to the bootprint on the wall in the boiler room, he would have had his man, but the neighbor and his pal from New Milford (he had someone to help him out, to drive the stolen goods over the state line) wore rubber gloves, and even took an ink pad out of my desk, rubbed the ink on their rubber gloves and touched a lot of stuff on purpose, in a way that the detective described as taunting. As a result, the really straightforward proof was lacking and apparently still is.

  Laurel also found out that the accomplice of the felon down the road had three kids. And she of course checked out the Facebook page of his wife, or partner, or, at least, the mother of his children, whose Facebook posts were morose and despondent, presumably because the ATV enthusiast (whose interests on Facebook often orbited around NASCAR) was going away to the penitentiary. We felt really sorry for him about his kids, but we also wished that he had found a way to pay for his kids and/or his drug habit that did not involve melting down our jewelry and cutting out the copper pipes from the utility room.

  On it went, the police investigation, and the aftermath of the break-in, through our first wedding anniversary. By which I mean, that the break-in, or break-ins, occurred almost exactly on the anniversary of our wedding, namely the day on which we went to City Hall in New York City with Amy Hempel and Randy Polumbo. On our first anniversary, therefore, we were getting an emergency release of funds from our insurance company, after which the construction company arrived on the premises, taking all three thousand books out of the basement, boxing them up, and tearing out the floor and the drywall, removing the appliances in the basement including the destroyed water heater, and replacing most of these, all of this owing to the very legitimate fear, on the part of our insurance adjustor, of mold. The price for the initial repair was $19,000, but when we finished paying for everything that had to be repaired, the repainting, the stolen items, the insurance claim rose to $100,000. All of this so that a guy from right nearby, and his friend from New Milford, could pawn some rings, and sell a couple hundred dollars’ worth of copper pipes to a disreputable metal dump in the area.

  The construction took almost six months to finish, and in addition to the repairs in the basement and the repainting, we installed (as you could imagine) a very deluxe home alarm system, including cameras on the three doorways, which we could then watch remotely from New York City. When the avuncular detective from Poughkeepsie finally told us that he needed his deer cam back, we bought our own, and trained it on the driveway, and then collected, over the ensuing years, really powerful and moving sequences in stills of the seasons changing on the front yard, UPS trucks going by, the occasional deer (as advertised), the azaleas blooming, the leaves falling, the grass getting cut, winter sweeping in again, drifting snow, the melt, the blossoms.

  We had our fingerprints taken, and various possessions were borrowed from us to be fully combed for fingerprints other than our own, but the perpetrators and their rubber gloves were more diabolical than that. We funneled information back to the detective, like the appearance of my guitars on eBay, and we figured out, in the course of our researches, which pawn shop was used for the jewelry. There were threads of information that seemed as though they might lead to the illusory closure that people want when they have been the victims of a crime, but we never particularly got closure, unless you mean seeing the wife of one of the perpetrators post on Facebook that she was “going through a hard time,” after he was picked up for the theft of the ATV, or when the local police told us that they had asked a known associate of the perpetrator, who had been apprehended for driving under the influence, if he knew whether the perpetrator had committed the robbery on our house, with the understanding that if he told the truth they would go easier with respect to his DUI, to which he said that he did know, and had heard, yes, that the perpetrator had robbed our house.

  I wrote a particularly savage short story about the experience.

  But that was about it. We were left to try to re-create the feeling that it was acceptable to live on five acres in the barren middle of farm country at night, when we understood that someone very nearby knew how to open our porch door with a crowbar. When we put this matter to the contractors working on our house—can you please find a way to ensure that this door cannot be opened by force from the outside, using the tools of your expertise—one of them said, “You know, if someone really wants to get in, they’re going to get in.”

  The first round of IVF, which followed not long after the break-in upstate, did not result in a pregnancy. We had a great many fertilized embryos coming out of the retrieval process, and then as the days passed, these great many embryos, twelve or so, started to fail, and by the time we went to transfer the one genetically normal embryo (a girl, because they tell you these things), she did not take, and we were out the many thousands, plus several more thousands for medication, and thus most of the money we had borrowed to attempt to bring about a pregnancy was spent, and we were in the meantime living part-time in a house completely haunted, a house whose new silent partner was the felon down the hill, whose ghoulish Facebook page we could regularly peruse, whose bootprint we had left on the wall in the utility room in the basement as a sort of reminder, and the rest of the time we were trying to have a baby, and failing to have a baby,
while I tried to parent my daughter to the best of my ability, taking her out to the playground, going to the movies with her—in short, anything she wanted.

  If you’ll allow me to skip ahead here, there is a sort of an ending to the story of the break-in (excepting that it never ends, because you can still go to the Facebook pages of the two guys who did it, and they are still friends, and they are apparently out of jail now, and at least one of them is a very ardent booster for marijuana and its ancillary products, and is also, well, a Juggalo, though it’s unclear what kind of Juggalo), and it is as follows. On our way to see my brother, in Wilton, Connecticut, where he lives with his family, we sometimes drove through New Milford, Connecticut, which is only twenty minutes or so from Amenia, where we lived in Dutchess County then, and in this capacity, on one occasion, we stopped for gas, or for some other ephemeral need, in a shopping plaza in New Milford, and pulled the car up in a parking space, without meaning to, right in front of the pawnshop where some of our stuff had been pawned after the robbery. It was sort of terrifying, in a way, to happen on this close encounter, in part because, despite all the rioting emotions after the break-in, I still sort of felt like I had made it up, or exaggerated it, or misconstrued it. I sort of felt, after the bright red horror of arriving home to see all of our stuff trashed, strewn about, that it was some kind of evil fairy tale I had composed. I didn’t really believe, as a practical matter, that the perpetrator lived nearby, though he did, or that he was capable of watching the house; I sort of felt like it was a story we told to make sense of the trauma of the break-in, something that Laurel and I could share to keep the panic of living at bay. But then we arrived at the pawnshop, and it upset the sedimentary activity of the whole thing, the silting over of it, stirring it up once again.

  It took a little while for this knowledge of the pawnshop to fester sufficiently, but then one day as we were anew driving near New Milford, Laurel insisted she was going to march into the pawnshop in New Milford, and have a conversation with the owner. If you have read this far in the book you know that Laurel definitely meant that she was going to do just that, was not exaggerating at all. Sometimes, with Laurel, she has to get really mad about something else (as when, for example, I have done something unusually stupid), and then she busts through any remaining inhibition and clears the deck on any lingering discontent. She gets it all out. And it was a frequent conversation we had, in fact, that pawnshops were immoral, and not because they cater to a particular economic rung that is full of desperation, or because they charge obscene interest rates, not immoral according to these traditional arguments. No, we believed that pawnshops were immoral because they don’t, and can’t, fully prevent stolen merchandise from entering their product stream. They look the other way on this stolen property, and they are protected by the lax statutory framework that excuses the pawn business from having to do more than look the other way, and thus all the melted-down jewelry, and the guitars that are quickly sold for cheap to a reseller, etc. The people who do the work of the pawn business traffic with thieves, and they know they are doing so, if they are being honest, and that is how they make their living. This was a subject we had often discussed. And Laurel, eventually, was going to discuss it with the owner of the pawnshop in New Milford.