The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven: A Novella and Stories

By Rick Moody

A spirited collection of stories revealing the extremes of the human experience from the author of The Ice Storm

In his first story collection, Rick Moody provides readers with a poignant, brazenly honest glimpse into the lives of a wide array of characters, from a paranoid husband obsessively listening in on his wife’s phone calls to the junkies and sex addicts of New York City’s underworld. Whether they’re grasping for connection or struggling to survive in a dismal and indifferent environment, these individuals’ haunting voices and the evocative worlds they inhabit make for a diverse and powerful volume.
 
Experimenting with form—one story is told as a term paper, another as an annotated bibliography—Moody demonstrates the vast range of his fascinations and talents, as well as his arresting command of language. Candid depictions of contemporary society and the inner-workings of distinctive characters’ minds bring these inquisitive, heartrending, and at times undeniably funny accounts to life.

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Rick Moody including rare images from the author’s personal collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Nov 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504027694

Rick Moody

Rick Moody was born in New York City. He attended Brown and Columbia Universities. He is the author of four previous novels: The Four Fingers of Death, Purple America, The Ice Storm and Garden State, as well as an award-winning memoir and multiple collections of short fiction. Moody is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, and his work has been anthologized in Best American Stories, Best American Essays and the Pushcart Prize anthology. Moody lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Book preview

THE PRELIMINARY NOTES

1 I began recording my wife’s telephone calls without her knowledge the Monday after the third weekend in April 1993.

1.1 I used twin Panasonic SP-77 dual-cassette answering machine systems that were nestled on a wooden filing cabinet (cherry, with a dark finish) here in my office. There was one machine for my line and one machine for my wife’s line. They were each resting there on the filing cabinet, an antique that I bought in Chester one Sunday after we were married—during the first intoxicating month of our union. The filing cabinet was flush against the wall by my desk. The office was, and is now, situated just down the hall from the kitchen, on the first floor. Its decorations were simple and unobtrusive and included a pair of cheap, imitation African masks and a poster for an exhibition by an artist I once met playing squash (a misty New England harbor dotted with seacraft). That morning, in my office, there was robust sunlight from two sides: north and east.

1.11   When her telephone rang I simply engaged her answering machine—the one that collected her messages—in the usual fashion. Normally I kept the volume on the machines turned down to a murmur so as not to distract me from my professional responsibilities. This habit had the coincident value, that morning, of concealing my activities. There was the cloak of silence. I was therefore able to accomplish three objectives: 1) to record my wife’s conversations; 2) to conceal this recording from my wife; and 3) to leave myself free to make a living. It was simple. If we are considering the technology involved, it was simple. In one instant the machine was off and in the next it was on.

1.12   Later, with similar calls, I found that if I was busy I kept the volume on her machine turned down entirely. I simply depressed the record button on a small remote-control device whenever her line rang. I studied the contents of the first call, as I did with others, when I had quality time—usually in the evenings, with a glass of wine (I’m a collector) when my wife was out and our child was asleep. Then I would engage the CD player on repeat mode with a stack of baroque anthems while I drank California chardonnays and played the incoming message cassette from my wife’s answering machine. I had an inexpensive box-style tape player for the playback of these low-fidelity recordings.

1.121 Certain passages from these tapes I repeated, certain important moments from important conversations—just as I repeated the CDs of baroque music (Die Kunst der Fuge, the Water Music)—relentlessly, until the meters and stresses of my wife’s conversations, her assonances and dissonances, her melodies and harmonies, her euphorias and dysphorias, her inhalations and exhalations, her strophes and antistrophes, her caesurae and enjambments, her melancholies and exuberances, her appointments and disappointments were as complex and enthralling as the finest love lyrics. When I had reached this critical moment with these passages, I went on to play them still more until I had exhausted all meaning in them, until I, too, was depleted and confused. My feelings had a tortuous progress. At the completion of each such evening, I made an observation to myself. Aloud, I said, I’m going to fix her ass in court.

1.2 As I have made clear, I was working that morning. I was in fact composing a report about a woman from Parsippany who had fallen in the lobby of a local department store. The tilework in the lobby had been slick from a late winter storm. The customers had tracked in some portion of the slush—as they could not help but do. The success of department stores depends on this kind of traffic, and only the most vigilant maintenance could have prevented the fateful accumulation of moisture. The woman, who was carrying home a teal bathroom throw rug (high pile) in a bright blue department store plastic shopping bag (large size), a bag emblazoned with the store logo, went into a skid in the lobby, on the aforementioned precipitation, within the purview of onlookers, the bag spilling its contents out onto the muddy entryway, befouling her brand new purchase, humiliating the woman in question, tearing a ragged seven-inch rip in her puce housedress and multiply fracturing her hip. It must have been really painful.

1.21 My work in the case consisted of studying the surface of the tiles in that lobby, their tendency to promote pedestrian hydroplaning in inclement weather and their converse relative safety when covered in high-density anti-skid textured rubber matting. (No matting was present on the day in question.) This kind of technical reasoning I then rigorously organized into an opinion, given orally or in deposition, such that my client—the firm of D’Antonio, Frost, and Berkoff—could bring a negligence suit against Caldor, the department store in question, on behalf of Mrs. Hilda Rodale of Parsippany, N.J., the woman with the bad hip. From a professional point of view, I was interested in questions like viscosity and drag and the melting points of sleet and freezing rain. Which is to say that my vocation was and is the vocation of engineer as expert witness in cases of negligence and/or personal injury.

1.3 I was attempting to write the report about the Parsippany case when the telephone rang. It was April 19, a Monday. Maybe 7:45 A.M. The technological possibilities of dual-cassette answering machines presented themselves to me that morning with a crystalline simplicity. The only surprise, really, was that I hadn’t thought of these possibilities sooner. I heard my wife pick up the telephone. In the kitchen. Just down the hall. Her machine was usually on—she left it on in order to give me space—but that morning for some reason just the opposite was true. The cat had walked across the machine, possibly, padded across its keypad in one of its evening strolls. Or perhaps my boy—who was prohibited from entering my office under any circumstances except by verbal invitation extended by me—had been exploring.

1.31 Whichever the cause, I simply turned on my wife’s machine. Though she was down the hall. That is, I heard her voice. I glanced at the lowboy. I scrambled for the remote control, which was in my pen drawer next to my supply of high polymer erasers.

1.32   The record button on the answering machine lit up promptly. Whereas the machine would not otherwise have recorded the call—since my wife had lifted the receiver, theoretically disengaging the recording head—it now recorded this conversation in full. My feeling is that Panasonic often manufactures reliable and sturdy electronic products. Their warranties are good. In this instance, the recording indicator lit up as it was designed to do and the recording head met the surface of the metallic tape as it was designed to do and the tape collected the call, regardless of the ethics entailed in my recording it. I turned up the volume a bit so that I could hear more than the sleepy burbling of her voice from the kitchen. I turned it up loud enough so that I could hear.

1.321 It goes without saying that the calls I was able to tape were those calls that took place during hours when my wife and I were together on the premises. That is, in all the instances herein described I was present to engage the telephone answering system. I had to be at home. I wouldn’t have been able to engage it, for example, from the Radio Shack in Chester. Therefore, any conversations in which my wife was totally alone are absent from this description of my activities.

1.33   It was a man’s voice. On Monday. The voice of her interlocutor. It was the voice of a particular friend whom I knew well enough. A man. An acquaintance. You will think this was the reason for my concern. You will suppose that some suspicion of her infidelity, of her betrayal, of her expending somewhere the finite morsel of understanding she had been given to parcel out to me, her helpmeet, would be a cause for alarm, as would the way her voice dwindled down—as I was listening—to a hoarse whisper, but this was not the case at all. Evidence of an infidelity might certainly have fixed her ass in court, but from a personal point of view this unfaithfulness was a mushroom already affixed to an enduring rot. Still, I decided to prepare a label for this cassette that indicated time, date, name of caller, and (briefly) contents.

1.331 I could tell from his voice, however, that this person, this man, was a heavy smoker. I had met him at barbecues and cocktail parties and yet I hadn’t noticed this particular quality before, his addiction. It was early in the morning—as mentioned above—and already he evinced the muffled, cottony baritone of a seasoned nicotine addict. There was also the hacking cough. It wouldn’t be long now before he had his own portable oxygen tank and a yellowed plastic feeder line to clamp onto his nose. I could see him dragging this oxygen tank (and feeder line and nose clamp) around on metal casters; lugging it upstairs, down escalators, through subway doors; believing a lie about his diminishing vigor. His death would be slow and uncomfortable. With the right lawyer, he could represent a fine product liability case.

1.4 However, at that moment I was mainly transfixed by the sudden fact of surveillance and by the sound of my wife’s voice. My wife’s voice when she did not know I was listening. My wife’s voice at the moment when, with a sigh of relief, she announced to this man I have just described that I, her husband, was locked in my office probably making rubber cement balls or jerking off or something. I could hear her voice both in the kitchen (down the hall) and here in the office. At the same moment. There was a doubling of voices, a voice and its technological identical. These two wives of mine were in lockstep. They were in perfect unison though they represented entirely different motives: A) my wife in the kitchen was discreet about her troubles; B) my wife on the black, plastic Panasonic answering machine speaker was voluble, even melodramatic.

1.41   And, I should say, she was speaking on a cordless remote telephone, a Sony product (not at all as reliable as the AT&T model of similar design, but my wife had selected it herself). She could easily have walked down the hall into the office—while talking—and happened on the fact that I was recording her call, because the thrall, the swoon, the cryogenic rigidity of my eavesdropping prevented me from doing anything initially but noticing the situation and immersing myself in it. She would have known something was amiss, because I wasn’t working, as I almost always was; she would have known because I couldn’t even glance up at the color enlargements of our boy upon the corner of my desk. She would have known. It was only eleven feet six inches down that corridor.

1.42   Her voice on the line was sad and lost. The way you would expect a voice to sound while it is being surreptitiously recorded. Sadness, however, is part of the interpretive signal error of surveillance, and this interpretive effect should be alluded to and then discounted. Beneath my wife’s superficial, technological melancholy, then, was a much clearer waveform, one I had never heard before. A sound beyond contempt, beyond frustration, a sound as new as the particularly singular call of the first emergency car alarm I ever heard (I was an early proponent of these alarms, because of my interest in security); as new as the overtones of a church choir ricocheting along chapel transverses. It was right after she said, If I have to listen to him lecture me one more time—about anything—about how you shouldn’t use more than one pillow or how you should always dry your feet thoroughly—or the importance of dental floss, just one more lecture, and I think I’ll take the fucking extra pillow and stuff it over his face while he’s sleeping. Right after that, she began to weep.

1.421 Or to put it another way, she was, in the first moments of the tape, as I experienced her generally in the later years of our marriage—passionless, wan, older than she had once been, in sweatpants and lavender Converse All Stars and a turtleneck with little blue flowers on it, arrayed in mediocrities, in signs of a giving up that had taken place in her, displaying the slack of middle age, of ambitions dispensed with. These qualities permeated her enervated whisper at first. I recognized there also insoluble problems, insoluble domestic problems, problems so entrenched and implying such rueful options that people were certain to get hurt. But then she began to sob, and this anguished sound was far in excess of these other examples of hopelessness I’ve just catalogued. This was the passage I played over and over again. Gosh, it was really something.

1.5 While her boyfriend prattled on tautologically about how marriage, well, is marriage, and it does pretty much what marriage is supposed to do and children, you know, they’re children, and uh, well, they bounce back in a way he must have imagined was supportive, my wife sobbed with such abandon that it was difficult for her to continue the conversation. Yet she managed not only to stay on the line but to continue preparing breakfast. I could hear the saucepans clanging and the refrigerator doors opening and closing. I could hear an egg timer. I could hear my child watching educational programming—as he was constrained to do according to a written contract he had signed. I could hear these things both through that tiny speaker and down the corridor that connected my office to the kitchen. Then, as the egg timer neared its bell, as the microwave finished bombarding the instant coffee, as breakfast, in fact, reached liftoff time, my wife gathered up her resolve. Her snuffling diminished. There was a pause, a breathless silence. Then my wife told her lover. She had to leave me.

2 I had become preoccupied with the Parsippany case.

2.1 I had been asked to look into the matter in late March by the firm of D’Antonio, Frost, and Berkoff. On the first weekend of April I drove to the Bergen Mall (taking Route 287 to I-80), with my boy, ostensibly to look at weapons simulations systems for his approaching birthday. I also intended to examine the foyer at Caldor. The day was wet and cool, but there were intervals of sunshine. We were driving a beige Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme (’87) with sixty-eight thousand miles on it. To my boy I had said, Son, come with your dad to Caldor and I will explain to you a few things about surface mechanics. I dislike the emphasis on stockpiling loot at contemporary birthday parties and so I did not want to overindulge him with the promise of glittering prizes. It was to be a working holiday, but there would perhaps be a reward. My boy was obliging.

2.2 Technically, the situation with Mrs. Hilda Rodale was no different from those complaints for which I had given testimony in the past. My clients, the law firms themselves, often opposed large corporations, because—as Leonard D’Antonio had explained it to me—these corporations had the resources. A settlement of one or two hundred thousand dollars could impact greatly on the lives of our injured parties, while, to a corporation like Caldor, this money was—and here I use Mike Frost’s term—chicken feed. The lawyers themselves were paid by plaintiff contingent upon a favorable settlement. However, I was paid regardless of the outcome. For some years, in spite of a declining client base, the difficulty in obtaining payment, and bad fiscal times in general, I had supported my family in this way.

2.21   However, there was something different about the Parsippany case. I tried to explain it to my wife. One night, before bed, as I folded my chinos and rugby shirt and set them on the armchair next to our uncomfortably narrow mattress, I began telling her about the last case, the prior case, the one before Parsippany, the case in which the man had had his arm crushed by a crane in Passaic, and then I told her about the two boys who were electrocuted by the video game at the arcade in Nutley and about the cancer clusters around the particularly large satellite dish outside the school in Peapack and about the Legionnaires’ disease outbreak that had killed seven at the Cape May Ramada and about the red tide, the nuclear effluents, the ultra-high-frequency wave emissions. I was telling her about my work. I was trying to tell her. I was trying to make conversation.

2.22   And then I began to describe Mrs. Rodale’s case. I told my wife how Mrs. Rodale had made her purchase at Caldor after seeing, in all likelihood, an advertising circular in her Sunday paper (the North Jersey Herald and Tribune), how Mrs. Rodale had braved threatening weather to go to Caldor that day, and how this evidence suggested she really needed her teal bathroom throw rug. Mrs. Rodale had parked (I’d learned) at some distance from the entrance to the store itself, and was intent upon hurrying back to her car after her purchase. Perhaps she had met someone in the store, someone she knew, who had described the size, scale, and menace of the blizzard, which was just then heading our way from the Great Lakes region. Whatever the case (I told my wife), Mrs. Rodale, with bathroom rug in hand, was simply hoping to make it home in one piece when she began her passage across the lobby of Caldor. She believed at that moment that her interests as a good-faith patron of Caldor were identical with the interests of store management. She believed the premises were safe or at least not gauntlets of danger. And then, I told my wife, just as the wet and really heavy snow had begun to fall (eventually there would be an accumulation of fifteen inches), and thus just as it was beginning to be tracked in the west wing entrance of Caldor, just then, as onlookers like stunned livestock gazed abstractly upon her, Mrs. Rodale, in a puce housedress, beige raincoat, and practical but slightly elevated pumps, went into her epic skid.

2.23 When Hilda came to rest (I told my wife), with her possessions scattered in a semicircle around her, with her dress torn, with her car parked on the open-air level of the parking facility, when Hilda arrived at that moment—disoriented, injured, and alone—she tried to stand. Imagine. She was in shock. She was confused. Her children had no idea where she was; she had no idea where she was. There was just this feeling in her of a primitive and urgent tardiness. She had to get home. She had to make things right. She stood. And in this way she learned that her femur and her hip were severely compromised by the fall. In fact, a young boy alerted her to the situation, pointing and crying aloud as she struggled upward and then collapsed, Her bone’s sticking out!—this according to Mrs. Rodale’s deposition. There was her ear-piercing cry of pain. A stretcher arrived.

2.24 But just as I was describing the arrival of the stretcher, the sound of sirens, my wife announced that she would hear no more. Abruptly she informed me, No more tragedies before bed, sweetheart, she said, and there was an exhaustion to her voice, I mean I know things haven’t been going well with us, let’s be honest, you know and I know things haven’t been going well, I feel like I haven’t talked to you in months, but I just can’t listen to this, I just can’t. You have to try to think about my feelings once in a while—for a change—I just don’t want to hear about it. You’ve got to try.

2.241 And her language was remarkably similar in her call of 4.24.93, 6:15 P.M., again to her nameless and chain-smoking paramour: I used to think he was funny. I mean I used to think the way he thought about things was funny, like he would tell me about some guy whose leg got crushed by a steel girder and I would think it was funny, but I just can’t listen to it anymore. I don’t know it’s not funny like it used to be. We used all of that up …

2.3 Three days after the bedside heart-to-heart with my wife, I stood in the mall entrance with my boy. The following were my instructions to him: Son, on a straight line from that circular door to this glass one by the perfume department how many steps do you think it is? How many steps do you think Mrs. Rodale had to undertake to safely reach the department store? Go ahead, go count them out. Go ahead.

2.4   In the foyer, he looked up at me hesitantly. (It happened that at this time my son’s feet were exactly eight inches long, at least when armored in his light-up, pump-style basketball sneakers. I had measured.) A throng of shoppers rushed past, in pursuit of advertised specials for anti-freeze and self-lighting charcoal briquettes. In the midst of this throng, my son held his ground. One mustachioed shopper, however, actually shoved my boy. By being stationary, I could now see, he had emerged as a foyer hazard, and with his lost and plaintive countenance he could eventually create a disturbance and