by Rick Moody
October 2014
October, when you come around now, you’re like a houseguest I don’t like very much. There’s a dread when the weather turns to you, when the leaves go past their peak and amass on the lawn, when the seasonal migration passes overhead and leaves behind a hush in its wake, when the crickets fall silent, when there’s the first frost. It’s four years later now, and I still hate the sight of you, October. Going back to the year in question, to the beginning of the second year of our marriage, even now, brings about your dying off of leaves and vegetation, brings about your chill, and an anxiety about your grim and whispered secrets. I wish I didn’t have to compile (in this longish chapter) all that you brought to the surface.
In the midst of this routine academic year that began in the fall of 2014, with all the driving to New Haven to teach at Yale, and back to NYC, Laurel was beginning our first round of IVF, and we did all the preparation in the first half of the month. There were so many pieces of paper to sign, and so much talk with nurses. We were back and forth to the clinic, as they showed us how the shots were supposed to be administered. I mean, they actually had us depress syringes, in mock preparation. Laurel was keeping up with it all, with the flows of acronyms and prescriptions and treatment protocols, but it was a big tightly wound ball of worry for me, especially the shots. I was supposed to be helping with the shots when the time came, especially the booster the night before transfer, which had to go into the muscle of her shoulder. Laurel was more uncomfortable with the ones in the stomach, which we started then, in October, and for a while I administered the shots in the stomach. It’s both horrifying, and, after a point, mundane, to be jabbing needles into your wife’s abdomen. I think we kept it all secret from Hazel, my daughter, and would wait for her to go to sleep or until she was off to school. Then all the medical paraphernalia came out, spread on the kitchen table like we were hitting the opiates hard. Laurel was trying to stay serene on all the meds, and the immune suppressors she was on, and we spent a lot of time watching mindless television at night. I have never seen as much of The Bachelor as I saw during that period. For a while, I was fully informed about The Bachelor, Bachelor in Paradise, and Teen Mom.
We owed my mother a visit in October. My mother was still in Bucks County, and we hadn’t been out in far too long. I got a distress call from my brother asking if we would make the trip, as my mother had been asking for me, and I agreed. Laurel was willing to accompany me on what was going to be anything but an easy trip. My brother said my stepfather was not really able to follow a conversation anymore. He quoted my stepfather as having said to him, “I know you’re in charge now…”
Despite my lackluster recent performance as my mother’s firstborn son, which I normally attributed to my constant travel and my young child, I had and have now a significant emotional bond with my mother. My mother’s situation, her immobility by reason of caretaking, causes me great heartache when I think about it too much, it is like a frozen subterranean aquifer of despair in me, and I was worried that the trip to Bucks County would just be too difficult for me, and for Laurel in a delicate moment. I suppose that was why I had put it off. Where they lived, in a subdivision in Doylestown, right near the highway, in one of those condos that seem designed to appeal to twenty-somethings with 2.2 children and minivans, inevitably made me feel like chewing my arm off and dashing into the woods to do some kind of naked, bloodcurdling self-sacrifice. The two feelings orbited around each other like roosters in a cockfight: intense protective feelings about my mother, and the desire to avoid her situation wherever possible. Even getting there was horrible, there was no interstate to Doylestown from New York City, you could go only partway, and then you had the endless slog through county roads for most of the last third. Inevitably you were driving behind a truck bearing a load of hay bales. This was my heritage, this was the woman who brought me into the world, and this was where she lived.
So we headed down, intending to meet my brother there.
The dinner the first night was not without its challenges. We went to a perfectly nice restaurant in downtown Doylestown, where the young and energetic professionals and the affluent families of Bucks County went to find others of their kind, but it was in that location that the scale of my stepfather’s disassociation was now apparent. He would occasionally bust into the conversation for a balefully incoherent rejoinder, some tangle of grammatical units that seemed to resemble syntax but did not entirely, and then just as quickly he faded out, which would leave a fault line of muted shock in the discussion where he had been. He had to be coached through the menu ordering and didn’t entirely know what to do with the silverware and the other tools of restaurant-visiting. And I could see my mother buoyed by our presence, and trying to make the most of it, having both of her children at hand, in the midst of this hardship. But it was impossible to keep the conversation going, as if we were all hiking on one of those incredibly steep hikes in which you have to keep quiet to manage the task. Periodically, from amid the lapsed banter, Laurel would venture a question, like: Peggy, what have you guys been watching on TV lately? Or something equally innocuous and preliminary, and we would head off trying to lasso a few sentences around the topic before giving up. But I found myself losing a grip on the necessity of talk, so overwhelming was it.
When we got back from dinner, Ken, my stepfather, was exhausted, and we were exhausted, too, and we all hit the pillow fast, in my case only to spend most of the night unable to sleep.
The next morning, we determined we should take my mother’s rambunctious golden retriever on a bit of a run to the park nearby, and this was in part to get some fresh air and some change of scene. But the second we slipped out the door with the dog, we noticed that Ken, my stepfather, was making a beeline after us. Not to be left behind. I think he was so attached to the dog that he didn’t want anyone to spirit away his esteemed companion, and he therefore wanted to make sure we were to be trusted with it. I should add that he had no idea who Laurel was, though he had been introduced to her multiply over the last three years, and he had been at our wedding. And he didn’t have any idea what my name was anymore, though he seemed to recognize that I had something to do with my mother. The dog was the only one going on the walk he knew at all well, but he seemed to want to go with us nonetheless, so out we went into the dewy October morning in the subdivision, over to the park—my wife, my mother’s ninety-pound golden retriever, and my very impaired stepfather.
That was one incredible park. Enormous, first of all, and it had a bunch of discrete ecosystems, a variety of outdoor opportunities, including this children’s play area that was an actual castle. It was one-quarter scale, let’s say, but otherwise it looked exactly like a castle. We took the golden retriever out to the meadow by the castle, where I tried to run him around until his tongue was hanging out. Ken stood there, perhaps anxious, but waiting. He said almost nothing. Laurel and I were in one of those situations in which we became even more closely allied as a team, in which no one is really going to be able to find the proverbial daylight between us, and that was just kind of how it was. I felt lucky to have her there with me, because I had mostly treated my familial pain as something that I had to deal with by myself. But she came, and helped, and she didn’t ask for anything in return, which is the definition of a legitimately excellent partner. We walked back from the park with Ken, had some breakfast, hugged my mom, and bantered a bit, and then we got in the car.
Because: it happened we had to drive to Saratoga Springs that night. In fact, it was destined to be a long day, because we were supposed to drive to Saratoga Springs, and I was meant to do a performance at a club there, and then we were going to turn around after the gig and drive back to Dutchess County. It was something on the order of six hours of driving or so over the course of the day, with a performance in the middle.
It was like this. I was asked if I would perform with this band called Cuddle Magic. (Performance, in this case, meant: would I read some stuff with m
usical backing.) I had written about Cuddle Magic before, and there were a number of reasons why I really liked Cuddle Magic. One of the reasons was that the lyrics were mostly written by a photographer I really liked, who has occasionally been mentioned in these pages, Tim Davis. He was Laurel’s friend too. They went to the Yale School of Art together, where, as the legend goes, the crits were so cruel that even Tim Davis cried at one point. This is perhaps apocryphal. You would know how improbable this is if you knew how admirably tough and resilient is Tim Davis. I don’t know if this is true, that he cried, or if it’s just to prove how hard the crits are, but that’s the story. Tim was a poet before he was a photographer, and there is a conceptual brilliance to his work that emerged in his poetry first. And he’s married to one of the best painters of her generation, Lisa Sanditz. They have a son who is just a bit younger than my daughter, and we see them now and again. Once we all trespassed at the Omega Institute upstate and swam in their pond.
Tim’s brother Ben is one of the main songwriters in Cuddle Magic, and Tim and Ben collaborate on the lyrics. Tim’s lyrics are both beautifully composed and acerbic, but somehow Ben, maybe because he’s Tim’s brother, can really sing them with real conviction, even though they are emotionally complex and sometimes circuitous. The rest of the band is remarkably inventive too. Ian Spiegelman plays winds and does a lot of the business stuff, and it was he who asked me to come along and wrote some music to go underneath my few short things. And then they have a singer called Kristin Slipp, whose range of skills is sort of not possible to itemize, so vast is it. She can sing jazz, standards, new music, anything else, and has extended vocal technique at her disposal too. And Christopher McDonald and Dave Flaherty and Cole Kamen-Green fill out the ensemble, and they all seem to be able to play anything and everything. They all met at music school and their original ambition was to play as quietly as possible. They had, at the time of this event in Saratoga, just released an album collaborating with a toy pianist called Phyllis Chen, and she was to play on the bill as well. Everything about this group of people was what I loved about music at this point, shifting time signatures, rhythmically complex pieces with simple arrangements, lots of analog instrumentation, complex vocal arrangements, and just really great songs. I would have hurdled a great number of hurdles to be on that stage that night. Just being around Cuddle Magic when they played amounted to some of the most fun I’ve had as a performer.
That the gig happened the same weekend as this trip to see my mother and stepfather was not ideal. The drive from Doylestown to Saratoga was really long, and I felt so down about my mother’s situation that mainly what I wanted to do was crawl underneath a rock somewhere and brood. Also, I had this inkling that the ticket sales for the Cuddle Magic gig were not as good as I had hoped, and Laurel had to have an injection in the stomach that night, and it was unclear how everything was going to get done and at what hour we were going to get home to our place in Dutchess County.
Because I have a lot of friends in Saratoga Springs, I knew we could expect to field a decently populated dinner at the all-natural café in town, and after sound check we went over to this health food joint, and we were having a quiet dinner with our friend Marc and the rest of the band, when we realized, or remembered, or had it dawn upon us, that it was time to give Laurel the shot. We reminded each other covertly, meaning we were not exactly going to broadcast it, and then we got up from the table and we snuck into the bathroom in the Four Seasons Café together; it was around a corner, hidden away, so I don’t think anyone knew exactly our strange purpose, but we went into the tiny bathroom together, and I stuck the hypodermic in, depressed the plunger, as I’d been trained to do.
The concert I was in town for was, it’s true, poorly attended. It was one of these cases wherein I realized, yet again, that often many of the things that are really important to me are only admired by groups of twos and threes. I remember being on a book tour once and a media escort told me that a certain popular writer of that moment had expressed great outrage when a reading he gave had only a hundred people at it. Many have been the readings when I have yearned for a hundred people! A sense of entitlement about audience gets farther and farther away the older I get, and I repeatedly find myself moved and delighted in crowds that are only modest at best. There were maybe fifty people at the show, that night, and we did the first set, and the promoter fellow urged us not to take a long break between sets, but we kind of did anyway, and there were even fewer people for the second set. As far as I was concerned, there were a lot of people I liked personally there, and they were dancing some of the time, even to the challenging time signatures, and I felt like the bits that I performed, especially as contrasts with the excellent music of Cuddle Magic and Phyllis Chen, were reasonably successful and didn’t really sound like anything else. I felt like it was one of those nights on which my only real regret was that I didn’t get to do it again the next night, and the night after that. I caused Laurel to stay till the very end, and she was cranky about it, but then we thanked the band, said goodbye to all our Saratogian friends lingering around the doorway to the venue where this was all taking place (a former church), and then we got back in the car to drive to Dutchess County.
My greatest fear, at night in the Northeast, was another deer strike, and by another deer strike, I mean that we’d already had one, in the summer of 2013, driving back from a radio fund-raiser in the greater Hudson, New York, area. There was a full moon that night, and maybe the deer were experiencing ecstasy over the lunar display. I remember that Laurel was leaning out of the car window trying to take a photograph of the moon with her iPhone, though everyone knows that is impossible, but we were on one of the two-lane stretches that crisscross the forest-and-agriculture section of Dutchess County, and I think I was not going that fast, because if I’d been going fast, Laurel would have had a doe’s head in her lap. As I wasn’t going fast, I saw the deer at the edge of the underbrush, and shouted shit! And I had that moment in which I debated whether to turn hard right to get behind the deer if it ran out into the road, or left to try to speed around it before it decided what to do. This is the age-old question of driving on country roads at night. I bet that the deer would not walk out in the road, which means I swerved left, at which point the deer did in fact walk out into the road. I was braking as this happened, and so I think I was probably not exceeding twenty-five miles per hour, or thereabouts, at which point, with the right front headlight and bumper, we gave the deer a rude shove, which caused her to do a sort of double axel on the county road, over and over, scraping herself up horribly, no doubt, after which, pausing only for a moment, she got back up on her feet and with a couple of mighty leaps dove headlong back into the underbrush from which she had come. We pulled the car into the next parking lot, a couple of tenths of a mile down the road, and called the police, who came and ascertained the truth of our story since: a) Laurel had a photograph on her phone of the moon, and the deer coming out onto the road, and b) there were bits of deer fur in the smashed headlight. The highway patrolman said he would have to go look for the deer, and, if she were suffering, dispatch her. We were told by certain friends that deer, even if able to walk away from the accident, sometimes died in the woods of their injuries or from fright. It was the kind of thing I did not want on my conscience ever again.
Accordingly, I was in a panic on this occasion, which is to say driving for two and a half hours in the dark in forested latitudes for a majority of the trip. I have a whole set of rules under which I will drive at night in the country now, and here are some: drive next to the median, not in the right-hand lane. There are fewer deer on the median. Also, use your horn to frighten the deer. They get spooked by loud noise, thus all those deer whistles. And constantly scan the brush at the side of the road. These rules are doubtless ways of feeling falsely reassured, but they are how I get myself home when I have to drive at night. I can remember feeling really horribly tired on the drive in October, seeing a deer in every shrub b
y the road, with my glasses on, which I almost never wear except at night in the car: Is that a deer, right there? Is that a deer there? Grabbing the wheel hard, and letting go, grabbing hard, letting go, trying to keep myself reasonably awake.
We pulled into the driveway about midnight. I was dead on my feet, as the saying goes, when I got out of the car.
Here’s an engrossing detail: we’d been having this problem where the garage door occasionally opened by itself. The automatic garage door. This was on the long list of first-world problems, problems that have to do with privilege, with having got a lot of things right with life. But it was also on the long list of things I was somewhat incompetent to fix. Because I am a liability with tools, and am also phobic about telephone calls to anyone handy or construction-oriented, I had not yet ascertained if this problem with the garage door opener was a myth, or something that could be fixed. I didn’t yet know if I simply forgot to close the garage door. I pay very little attention to the practical, on-the-ground issues in my life. I can go a month without thinking about whether I should water a plant, or change a sheet, or take a vitamin. I just don’t think about these things. Is there a dead limb on the tree in the yard? I might get to that at some point in the next five years. And it’s not that I expect someone else to do these things for me, because that would horrify me; it is more that my relatively minimal capabilities in the areas of practical world skills just don’t improve, as I grow older (though I wish they would). Thus: it was very possible that, when the garage door appeared to be open, as it did from time to time, I had forgotten to close it on the way out of town. I had occasionally pondered whether someone in the neighborhood had a garage door opener that worked with a similar frequency, who was somehow inadvertently able to open ours. Or maybe the guy who cut the lawn somehow triggered the garage door. Or maybe the garage door simply malfunctioned from time to time. I just was far more likely to be thinking about Flaubert, or Virginia Woolf, or that obscure British prog band called Gentle Giant, than I was to think about why the garage door was occasionally open. Since there was really no one in the hamlet of Amenia, excepting a few trailer park residents down the road some, I never worried particularly about the garage door being open. There was a bike in there, maybe two, and some rusty hand tools, a rake, and that was all. There was nothing to take.