Who Is Rich?

by Matthew Klam

  Chewing his lower lip, blinking at me, talking about some French fellowship, oblivious, harassed, as if French people had been calling all night and he hated to disappoint them, as a woman appeared at his side, with flyaway hair and skin so fair she was glowing, hugging his book to her chest.

  “I’m so tired, man, I haven’t done any work in, like, months—”

  As another young woman walked past us in pigtails, then stopped short when she realized it was him.

  “—new idea for a book but I need to get into a quiet place, and hopefully kind of erupt—”

  “Sure, of course.”

  “You’ve been living the life for, like, ten years!” he said, taking a step toward the picnic table and his waiting fans. “You gotta tell me what it’s like. That’s why we gotta hang out!”

  “Absolutely!” Fuck you.

  He gave me a tired wave, a polite smile, almost sad, and I gave him a reassuring nod.

  Tell you what it’s like, Angel. I sold ten thousand books in the last six years. He sold a hundred thousand copies in hardback in three months and foreign rights in thirty-eight countries. That’s, like, a million bucks in royalties. The woman in pigtails hesitated, but the blond one had her book ready and jumped.

  I’d seen his work somewhere, maybe I saw an excerpt in some anthology, or maybe his publisher sent me a galley, or I might’ve seen it in a bookstore, in a stack on a table in front, and stood over it for however many hours it took to read the thing from start to finish, before stumbling back out into daylight, shivering and mumbling to myself, groping my way out the door.

  Ran out of money. That fucker!

  Angel Solito traveled from Guatemala to California, mostly on foot, mostly alone, eleven years old, walked a continent to find his parents, and finally did but never found the American dream. His story was rendered in clear bold lines, with faces delicately hatched, with big heads and a ferocious expressiveness. Reviews of his work had been universally frothy. In the days after I read it I had strange moments, traveling to some breathy place, almost happy, imagining that it was my book, my story, that I’d walked three thousand miles to find my parents, four and a half feet tall, eighty pounds, and alone.

  He stood by the picnic table as more bodies surrounded him. He had caramel skin and shiny black hair. I felt the thrill of being him, like they were digging me, thanking me. I’d dreamed of the big time, and here it was, so beautiful, so real! Then I remembered that I didn’t get robbed by soldiers and chased by wolves. I didn’t crawl across the Sonoran Desert. Where I came from, eleven-year-olds could barely make their own beds.

  I grew up in a middle-class suburb with good public schools an hour north of the G.W. Bridge, under a stand of white pine trees in an old house with wavy wooden floors and a loose banister. Walking thousands of miles to find my family would’ve been unnecessary. My brother lived across the hall. My father sold life insurance and other tax-dodging instruments from a skyscraper in New York City. My mom taught music to fourth, fifth, and sixth graders, in an attempt to make up for her own artistic failures. We lacked for nothing in that house except talent.

  Back in the studio, a dozen people sat bowed, bent over their desks—doing what? Trying to pump life into a poorly realized, made-up world. Brandon didn’t know where to put his word balloons, and Rebecca needed a beveled edge, and Sang-Keun couldn’t figure out how to draw a cowboy hat.

  “It’s round but curved,” I said, leaning over his shoulder. “Like a Pringle potato chip. A disk intersecting an ovoid.”

  What did he see as my hand flew across the page? Several cowboy hats, spilling out of a pencil. Did he notice how each one was unique and expressive, reflecting the life of its owner? Did he note the skill or understand how hard I worked to make something difficult look effortless?

  He touched the collar of his T-shirt, staring at the drawing as I moved to the next desk. He didn’t know anything. He didn’t care. I showed Sarah how to turn on the light box, and walked to the sinks and looked out the window, and tried my best to stay out of the way as a new generation of artists pounded at the gates of American graphic literature.

  After class I cut across the lawn with a girl who wore cat-eye glasses and had small, pointy teeth, and a man with clay dust all over him, whacking it off his clothes, and Vishnu, who kept bumping into me.

  “Professor,” he said, “in an interview you said male cartoonists are derivative whereas women are all original. Isn’t that kind of sexist?”

  “I think I said guys have to shake off Batman comics. Women don’t have that as much.”

  “Did you ever play Five-Card Nancy or stay up all night to do a twenty-four-hour comic?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” He gave me a canny look, one cartoonist to another.

  “There’s no point.”

  “I couldn’t agree less.” He was a thin, beaky young man with a hollow-boned lightness and no romance in his heart. His hair was thick, blue black, and chopped above the ears. “Do you use a drawing tablet?”

  “No.”

  “Well, what’s your favorite inking tool? And what kind of ink, and which nibs, and how do you hold and use the nib? Can I get a demo tomorrow?”

  “Sure.”

  “Have you ever used a toothbrush for texture?”

  The problem of walking and talking on a hilly, shifting terrain presented itself.

  “Do you like to use a smooth paper or something more grainy?” He thought I knew the secrets and could lay them out for him like coconut macaroons. I told him we’d discuss it in class.

  At the beginning of class he’d corrected my pronunciation of his name: “Not Veeshnu. Vishnu.” At the end of class he’d asked if I planned to cover self-publishing and self-promotion, and if I had advice on how to get his self-published work into circulation. I said no, but I only said it because I felt that a person who showed up with a stack of sophisticated mini comics to a class advertised for beginners could go fuck himself.

  For the rest of class he’d just sat there, though when I asked if he had an idea to work on, he seemed to nod toward his massive accomplishment, his minis, and said he was deciding between a few possibilities, then asked if I had a pub date for my next comic, to draw a comparison I guess, that I wasn’t producing anything at the moment, either. When you’re the new guy, with a new book out, they treat you one way. When you’re the same guy six years later, it’s something else.

  In the main office, a blond kid had me sign a tax form so I could get paid. He told me without smiling that they needed people after lunch for softball. According to the contract, teachers were expected to play.

  In order to reach this place I’d crossed several state lines, mounted several bridges, exited highways, and ridden others until they ended. I eventually headed down a coveted stretch of land, surrounded by water on three sides, known by painters for its light, somewhat unto itself most of the year but overrun in July and August, and finally reached my destination.

  Everybody knows a spot like this, a fishing village turned tourist trap, with pornographic sunsets and the Sea Breeze Motel. Out of respect for the powerful emotional attachments people form to such places, I’d rather not say exactly where I went, in the event that the detailing of my location causes even more congestion on the streets of that nicely preserved, remote southern New England coastal town.

  A Dutch windmill stood at the highest point on campus, a replica or maybe the real thing, brass plates screwed to its siding from an ongoing fundraiser to repair it. On the distant practice fields, yellowing in the heat, the college held a lacrosse camp for high school boys and girls. It sat along some quaint national seashore, amid a high number of colonial-era buildings, among shifting mountains of sand, speckled with dune grass. A frolicsome place, a remote place, a place I’d barely heard of before coming here to teach. We arrived by bus or ferry or train or car, or airplane service direct from Boston. Because of its location, the conference had an easy time attracting artists, oil
painters, memoirists, old guys, skitterish teenagers in search of illicit pleasures, driftwood sculptors, printmakers, actors, and playwrights.

  They offered a filmmaking workshop. They taught all kinds of crafts. In the afternoon there were shuttles to the beach and a Ping-Pong table in the main building and shows in the gallery and staged readings of plays in the auditorium every night. The writers took classes in red brick buildings with white shutters. Other buildings were crumbling or had been condemned and were barricaded behind tall metal fences with posted signs. The actors camped out in the auditorium. The studios were over the hill, on the far side of the windmill, in what had once been a shipyard. Fine Arts occupied a long, skinny two-story wooden structure that creaked like a sailboat, shingled and faded, and there were cinder-block dorms where they’d put me the first two years, and a wharfy, flaking cottage where they stuck the gang of interns.

  This year they’d put me in the Barn; it really was a barn, chopped into apartments for staff during the year, and still partly unfinished. The door to the top-floor apartment wasn’t locked, it didn’t even close, it thunked against the doorframe, swollen from the seacoast weather. It was one big open room with the angled walls of an attic, rusted skylights and a windowed cupola in the peak, and a narrow swath running down the middle of the room where you could stand up straight. There was a kitchen, frying pans whose handles fell off when you touched them, a coffee table and dresser, a white plastic fan, a filthy plaid couch, and two twin beds crammed in along the eaves.

  I’d arrived on Friday at five and hung up my shirts, my head at an angle, hitting it once hard enough on a beam that I expected my skull to crack open and my brain to fall out. I stood on the bed and with some effort cranked open the skylight, stuck my head through, and looked out across campus. I heard a seagull bark like a dog. Over the rooftops of the little town I saw blue water, the harbor jetty, and a dinky lighthouse I’d never noticed before. I felt like I’d shimmied up the mast of a ship.

  No humidity, no horrifying summer heat, no buses banging down the avenue, no garbage trucks, no marital rancor, just a clean white mattress on a low metal frame, and nobody to wake me up in the middle of the night by punching me in the head, or barfing down my neck, or giving me a heart attack every two hours with his bloodcurdling screams. Nobody else yelling “Daddy!” through the shower door. When I tell her to stop she begins kissing the door, because that’s how much she loves me.

  I loved them, too. What would I do without them? All last week, I’d had moments of fear and excitement, waking up with a stomachache, worrying how they’d live without me, while peeling Kaya’s carrots, packing Beanie’s diaper bag, but also feeling less owned by them and maybe cocky and probably gloating, unintentionally ignoring Robin, and she’d noticed it, shaking her head and muttering how I’d already checked out or was too lazy to marinate the fish, rolling her eyes when I forgot to put ice in her water, not wanting it when I came back with the ice tray. Kaya picked up on it too, woke up in the night and needed to pee, wondering if she could have some potatoes, telling me about Louis, the turtle at camp, as we walked back from the bathroom and I tucked her into bed. Maybe it was all in my mind.

  We shared our babysitter with the family of a girl named Molly. Robin had picked them up from Molly’s on her way home from work on Friday. I’d called them from the highway in the last hour of my drive. Her mom and stepdad were coming for dinner if they could get it together. I heard Beanie, grunting and sucking, and Kaya going, “Horsey horsey,” which meant Beanie was on Robin’s boob and Kaya was on Robin’s knee.

  “Maybe they won’t come,” she’d said.

  Her mom was in the late stages of dementia, and her stepfather was attempting to drink himself to death. Her sister lived three thousand miles away and never called. Her brother had faded into myth.

  “It’ll be fine,” I said. “Make your frittata.”

  “All right,” she said to Kaya. “Knock it off.”

  “Kaya,” I said, knowing she could hear, “get off Mommy so Beanie can eat.”

  “She used to make jokes: ‘When I’m drooling in the corner, smother me with a pillow.’ ”

  “She’s not drooling.”

  “Yet. But maybe this is when I’m supposed to kill her.”

  “Don’t kill her tonight.”

  “All right.”

  “Or at least make it look like an accident.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do. Kaya, stop it.”

  “Sorry.”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  I didn’t know who she was talking to.

  If Robin needed help she’d call Elizabeth, who lived eighteen feet away. They liked to stand in the alley between our two houses and talk intensely as the girls rode up and down on their tricycles. Robin talked about Beanie’s sleep patterns and Kaya’s emotional IQ. Elizabeth talked about her fourteen-month-old’s language problems and her seven-year-old caving to the mind games of her five-year-old. They talked about clients Elizabeth saw for psychotherapy and a story editor who tortured Robin. They discussed clothing, did fashion shows for each other: can I get away with this, is this consistent with my persona? They talked about cutting off their hair, glass beads, making jewelry, maternity undergarments, the anti-inflammatory properties of turmeric, hot yoga, colon cleansing, the perils of a Montessori education, the naughty spanking trilogy, the sexy vampire movies, postpartum body issues, hip pain, back spasms, stretched stomachs, cosmetic surgery where they freeze your fat. If you got her talking long enough, Robin mentioned her weight, that she was bigger now, so she thought her head looked too small. They talked about sex and marriage, aging parents, the transformation of a loved one in decline, the terrible suffering of their mothers, helplessness and guilt.

  I hung up and drove the last fifty miles to campus. After unpacking the car I went to dinner and ate barbecued chicken under the big white tent, at a table with Howard, a bald guy with a tanned, polished head, and Tina or Dina, who’d come here last year and made sculptures out of wire. After dinner we crowded onto the porch, where a poet read a poem. Carl gave his welcoming remarks, urging us not to climb through windows if we lost our dorm keys. Then we went off to see the theater company do a mash-up of Chekhov plays, set in the 1930s, with Uncle Vanya shooting himself in the second act, wandering in and out with a bandage on his head. In the big hall of the main building I heard Tabitha give the same talk she gave last year, about her spiritual journey beyond incest, into alcoholism, then past that, into group sex and casino gambling, ending in healing and forgiveness. In the gallery there were photos taken by an American soldier during some of the hundreds of trips he’d made while bringing fuel to stranded convoys all over Afghanistan, of the landscape, people, and culture, before he himself was finally blown up and killed. The photos survived. I ate some chocolate-dipped strawberries and talked to a woman with blue streaks in her hair.

  Then I went back to the Barn, hung my pants on a nail in the wall by the refrigerator, and thought about Robin, what she was doing, what I’d be doing at that hour if I were home. It was just the usual struggle to stay in love, keep it hot, keep it real, the boredom and revulsion, the afterthought of copulation, the fight for her attention, treating me like a roommate, or maybe like a vision of some shuddering gelatinous organ she’d forgotten still worked inside her.

  First a guy sticks something in you. Then a thing grows inside your body. Eventually it tears its way out, leaving a trail of destruction. Then it’s outside your body, but still sucking on you. It makes you weird, these different people in you and on you. Robin had had two C-sections and felt that they’d put her back together wrong the second time. A cold electric twinge shot down her back, down her leg, while walking, sitting, standing, or lying down. It defied any cure, painkillers, epidurals. For a while she wore a small black box on her belt that electro-stimmed her buttocks.

  In a previous life, she bit my neck and licked my ear when we did it. After Kaya, I worried about courting her i
n my pajamas, with our little angel breathing down the hall, and lost focus and cringed as Robin’s patience ran out if I finished too fast or not fast enough and overstayed my welcome. Bad sex was better than nothing, but Beanie effectively ended the badness. Fuckless weeks, excused by parenting, turned weirdly okay. Like our anniversary, we weren’t sure anymore when it was supposed to happen. And, with the exception of my tongue on her clitoris every who knows when, she didn’t need to be touched. She had vibrators for that. I think she mostly thought of what I did as a way to save batteries.

  Our sex life hadn’t been mauled by depression, routine, or conflict as much as it had been mauled by distraction, diffusion, a surfeit of beauty. Was that it? Our children’s vitality and strangeness, their softness, shocked me every day. Their lightness and willingness and spirit and stupidity surprised me, their readiness to bravely step into a world they couldn’t understand, packed with swimming pools, speeding cars, blazing sun, fanged dogs, stinging bees, heat, silent anger, slammed doors, inexplicable demands, funny hats slammed on their heads, and constantly from every direction these giants with twelve-pound heads, ten times their weight, five times their height, grabbing, pushing, shoving past, talking loud, telling them how to think, what to want, how to treat their own impulses, which ones to kill, which to love. No to crawling inside a dishwasher or smacking your food when you chewed. Yes to climbing trees and sucking your toes. I was sad for the bleakness of a little kid’s bumbling existence, envious of the simplicity of their cause. They faced the world because they had no choice. Someone was crying. Someone had pooped his pants. They were explorers in a new land. Robin and I stood by them, in parallel formation, to witness and guide them.

  Parallel, as if on the same track, running at the same speed, but not touching and having no way to touch. Parallel like people who went to bed without remembering to say good night, or saying it without meaning it, or meaning it but not saying it. I appreciated how on those rare occasions when my wife would kiss me, she did so with flat lips, popping them the way she did when she smacked at her ice cream. In this way she turned my face into something more palatable.