Mallory's Camera

We’ve reached the hottest time of the year. Temps in the mid-90°s throughout the afternoon and into the evening.

This is a pain in the ass for moi since being the laziest person on the planet, I naturally like to sit and drink coffee for many hours after I first wake up and think deep thoughts about the Real Housewives and the Weimar Republic v. 2.0 and whether pigs have wings.

This isn’t possible when you have to get out and exercise before the mercury hits 85° at 9 a.m.

Not climate change.

Just the way midsummer works in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley.

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Yesterday, I got out too late and felt like I was gonna die on the Walkway—whose parking lot has not been closed despite all those menacing signs.

I ran into the enchanting Nico:



His slaves Neighbor and Mrs. Ed looked as defatigued as I felt.

I did not finish the current Remunerative Project, which kinda pissed me off—I came so close. But my mind was too muddled; I just couldn’t concentrate on clear logical thoughts.

So, instead I finished watching Under the Banner of Heaven—exceptionally well done, I thought. Dustin Lance Black took many liberties with the Lafferty narrative but those liberties were in the interest of turning out a perfectly dovetailed story, all of a piece.

Things I Have Learned About Mormon Fundamentalists from watching Under the Banner of Heaven:

(1) “Fornication” and “adultery” have nothing to do with sexual intercourse. They are crimes committed when a wife is not properly subservient to her husband.

(2) If you want to lure a Fundie back from the Dark Side, tempt him with Whitman Chocolates.

Now, I am reading the Krakauer book. It is very different from the FX TV adaptation.

Murder and mayhem fascinate me. Why would anyone want to beat six people into bloody pulp over a X-Box? What kinds of wacky personal narrative culminate in a death struggle over video games?

But of all the bizarre crimes of passion floating through headlines right now (distractions from more substantiative issues like the war and the elections and the soaring cost of oil) the one that’s really caught my imagination is Mark Hacking.

Mark Hacking is the nice Mormon boy who perpetrated the fantasy that he was going to medical school upon wife and respectable LDS family successfully for several years. And when it finally fell apart – a little light reconnaissance work on the part of the wife, Lori, and really you have to wonder why it took her so long – bam! He shoots her in the middle of the night. Rather cold-heartedly disposes of her body by dumping in a trash bin (thereby violating a basic Law & Order premise that if you know your victim, you’re likely to treat your corpse more gently, covering it with a raggedy blanket or something.) Buys a new mattress. Buys some cigarettes – lime-flavored Camels – at a local 7/11. Doesn’t speak during this transaction but in between Lady Macbeth-like wringing of his hands, silently signals the store clerk not to tell his wife. (Cigarettes! Bad Mormon, ba-a-a-a-a-d Mormon!) Goes on nation-wide TV for an emotional appeal: Help Me Find Lori! Then strips off his clothes and merrily prances around the Deseret No Tell Motel until the local cops notice he’s behaving peculiarly and pick him up for questioning.

The case fascinates me because I, too, have a propensity for lying although I’m not sure I’ve ever spun out anything as elaborate as a parallel life in which I enrolled at Hogwarts for the Halt and Lame. Still. I have two old dolls in the store, the Franklin Mint’s Jackie Onassis and Lucille Ball. Jackie, my favorite of the two, generally stands regal and ignored in all her Oleg Cassini-garbed splendor; it’s Lucy who’s the crowd pleaser.

“Look! I-Love-Lucy!” (I-Love-Lucy, one word.) “Is she for sale.”

“No,” I explain with a sad but radiant smile. “She was my grandmother’s. After my grandmother… passed, my sisters and I got to pick mementos. They went for the expensive jewelry. But I picked the dolls. My grandmother never wore her jewelry. But she looked at those dolls every day.”

Ha, ha. Right. Like I’d pass up the chance to inherit a diamond ring.

My lie is serviceable. It establishes me in the eyes of potential customers as sentimental, a little scatter-brained in a business sense, someone from whom you can safely buy chili-themed tschochkes and kitsch at slightly below market value.

But what purpose did Mark Hacking’s lie serve?

Ben, too, is a consummate liar. In fact, he’s a lot better at it than I am, a veritable Duke of Deception in the full Geoffrey Wolfe sense of the term. Over the years I’ve been his dupe many times. There were the lies that had no impact on our shared domestic life – vestiges, I suppose, of his crazy myth-making twenties: his one gay affair had been with Allen Ginsberg; his wife, Sheree, had been William Gibson’s muse and the original of [insert trash-talking, tattooed heroine’s name here]; he’d won several major poetry fellowships while living in a New Mexico commune in the late seventies. Then there were the lies that required major clean-up. The shock when he lured me to Reno to help him with a broken down car only to discover that the police had impounded it because he’d been driving with stolen license plates. The six months after Sports Illustrated laid him off – and People Mag had just laid me off – and we had no income coming in at all except what I could eke out through freelance writing assignments, and he didn’t tell me he had been laid off, he kept insisting: it’s a screw-up in accounting, it’s a screw-up in the mail room. That one was tough. That one threatened our survival.

“So how come you never murdered me in my sleep?” I asked Ben, sifting through the morning headlines over breakfast coffee.

“Murder is a little over the top, don’t you think?” Ben asked mildly. “Can you pass the salt?”

Mormon theology is just so interesting. Patriarchal families eking out hearth on their own homestead planets after death. The Angel Moroni with a real estate license: “This one has a fabulous view of Jupiter –“

And poor Lori Hacking. Bound in eternal marriage to the murderous Mark, she has to go on sharing that split-level ranch-style paradise home with him for all eternity. Presumably with the grown up ghost of the fetus who also got wacked plus all the spermatophytes that might have been turned into finished products if only Mark had had the guts and humility to hit up his rich parents for tuition to a medical school in Grenada.

“Do you think it was the last name that did it?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, with a name like ‘Hacking,’” I said. “A name like that predisposes you towards certain kinds of behavior, don’t you think?”

“Well, he didn’t go on a homicidal rampage with a machete,” Ben pointed out, reasonably enough. “Ah, this is sad. Red Adair died.”

"Who?"

“Red Adair. The guy who invented the science of putting out oil well fires?"

I shook my head.

" Remember back in the first Gulf War, how they predicted that the fires in the Kuwaiti wells would burn for years and years? ‘Oh no they won’t,’ Adair told them. And he had them out within six months. He was in his eighties then.” Ben chewed meditatively on a piece of toast. “I remember hearing him do a radio interview a few years ago. ‘I want to go to hell when I die,’ he said. ‘I’ll put out all the fires.’”

In my father’s mansion, there are many Valhallas.