Who Is Rich?

by Matthew Klam

  What I knew about Robin at twenty-six has since been overwritten by our twelve years together, by the fuzzing of boundaries that separate us, by events we faced beyond our abilities, by the sound of a four-note wooden xylophone our son liked to beat the shit out of at five A.M., and by the immutable cycles of birth and sleep. It’s not an excuse, for anything really, but there were nights Beanie woke up screaming every fifteen minutes. I could count on one hand the times in his life he slept more than two hours straight. It became a secret among us, like domestic beatings, what went on in our house after dark.

  Sometimes I blamed our daughter, who fell between the mattress and the wall, or had bears in her dreams, or the rain upset her and drove her out of bed. Sometimes I blamed my wife, who never did figure out how to sleep, who needed protection from the chaos, and wore earplugs and a satin eye mask, and had a bag of prescription drugs she kept hidden in her underwear drawer, and in an emergency had to be shaken awake, and couldn’t go back to bed or take naps during the day, and in sleep debt quickly spiraled into anxiety and short-term mania.

  But I woke up smoothly and easily when he screamed, and took him from the crib at the foot of our bed and carried him away and fed him or sang him a song, and he went back down for a while. Then I wandered from the bedroom to the couch to the futon in the basement, helpless and itinerant, waiting for his cry, so that the silence became loud, and the quiet throbbed and roared through the stillness like a marching band. If I lay there long enough, I split the worry into so many pieces it started to glitter, and I got dizzy and hopeful and felt grateful for the sounds of cars, birds, dawn.

  I did the nights. In the morning I rested on the couch half-dead while Robin got them dressed. Sometimes as I lay there, my daughter came close and made a little ponytail on the top of my head. There were mornings when I wished I could escape or be put out of my misery, but the accumulation of good behavior, the years placed end to end, had also made me strong, although sometimes it occurred to me that it was all too fucking weird, as I struggled to stay the course, all this goodness and responsibility; it seeded an impulse toward endless badness and rebellion.

  Sometimes as I lay there Robin bent down to see how I was, touching my hand with a look of eagerness or tenderness in her eyes, almost like hunger or lust, a look I didn’t see much in any other context, asking gently for a recap of how bad it had been. Sometimes she brought me toast. I think my pain meant something to her. I think she enjoyed my suffering almost as much as I did. Like lovers using clamps and whips, it somehow brought us closer.

  She gave them life, gave them milk from her breasts, nursed them through sickness and colds, made a throaty sound when she hadn’t seen them all day, moaning, kissing them all over. She did the days. I handed over my paychecks, any option money or royalties that hadn’t dried up; she pooled it with her money, paying the bills, taking them to kid parties, doctors, setting up playdates, hanging with other mothers, deciding on Kaya’s preschool, wondering if I could take a more active role in decisions. Sitting in a little chair by the door of Kaya’s classroom last fall for three straight weeks, her back breaking, trying to get Kaya to calm down and hang in there. She was strong, strong-willed, and shouldn’t have been surprised that her daughter was, too. She got field producers and actors to do what she wanted, took hours of incoherent B-roll and turned it into tight twelve-minute arcs, understood how the wildlife conservation movement had failed African lions.

  For several years, following her time in children’s television, Robin worked for an international news agency, and went all over Latin America, and held a camera and got dengue fever and hired soldiers to take her into the mountains. She had friends who were stabbed, kidnapped, or disappeared. Later she worked at the bureau, going out on assignment once a month, and until Kaya was born she ran the desk, Central and South America and the Caribbean, sending out other people to risk their necks the way she once did. Eventually she burned out and quit.

  She wound up at the Nature Channel, which was perfect for a mom with a small kid. Her co-workers sometimes arrived still wearing their morning tennis outfits. The newsroom had been exciting and desperate and prone to burnout, but the Nature Channel was ergonomic and well lit and had the congenial atmosphere of a shoe store. She didn’t make films anymore; the channel didn’t make anything. It bought the finished product, shows about water buffalo, flora and fauna, and also, increasingly, the stuff that filled prime time: a “science” show about people too fat to wear clothes, a “history” show about bombs that fit up someone’s body cavity. A show about a man with huge testicles was not yet considered a celebrity vehicle. She still got to travel, but not to the Galápagos. Twice a year her department went to Wheaton, Maryland, for an afternoon of paintball.

  Then she had morning sickness, puking her guts out for eight or ten or fifteen straight weeks, it’s hard to remember now, wishing she could give me a nonlethal form of salmonella so I could know her pain. After Beanie was born she took time off again, and for the last six months had been edging back in, happy to work part-time at Connie’s small production company, whose only client was the Nature Channel, making a sweet little PSA she loved, destined for the wee hours of the night, about girls in poor countries who were victims of early marriage. A former executive producer for the channel, she was now a so-called independent producer, with no benefits, no contract, no real job, at the mercy of bland, plodding, overpaid executives on staff.

  Between us we’d had terrifying gaps in employment, clients who’d gone bankrupt, work stoppages, lean times, hospital bills, economic downturns, crises of confidence, bosses who’d lied or disappeared, and projects mercy-killed.

  There were moments when I too somehow failed to understand my place in the world or see what lay ahead, when I thought my own good luck would never end, when I mistook the work I did for a skill that builds on itself. I had years where money dropped from the sky, but also disappointments, broken dreams, ill-advised spending on copper saucepans and breathable raingear, troubles with the IRS, and a house we owned whose value had dropped below what we owed the bank. Six years ago, we’d borrowed from Robin’s mom to buy it. After the mortgage crisis we were underwater, and nobody would refinance the loan. A year or two later, we went back to Robin’s mom. She took out a second mortgage to bail us out. We got money from her dad to buy Robin’s car. We got a title loan against the car to pay bills. We set up a payment plan with the IRS guy, asked the worst credit card companies to cut our spending limit, begged them later to maybe raise it back up so we could eat, which, thank God, they refused to do. The magazine paid me on the twenty-eighth, like a monthly salary, although I wasn’t an employee, so a third of it needed to be set aside to pay taxes, which was completely out of the question, and would have to be dealt with down the road.

  While I sat there by the flagpole, a pair of gladiator-sandaled feet appeared on the grass in front of me, and two legs, and above that, Amy. She held up a finger for me to wait. She was being polite. She pulled the phone away from her ear and said, “Somebody wants my money.” I feigned outrage. She shook her head. “I’m on a conference call.”

  She was tall, with a long neck and good collarbones. She wore a gray sleeveless T-shirt and close-fitting blue-and-green plaid shorts. She had the bent posture and crimped mouth of a forty-one-year-old mom with three small kids. She didn’t look like her photos—ones she’d sent me, from a skating rink, or her bedroom, or with her oldest kid and a dog—which now seemed like one more problem to deal with.

  She’d tied up her hair for painting class. It looked smooth and glossy. Her cheekbones were high and soft, her arms tanned and freckled. She went back to the phone call, nodding her head as hair spilled from the knot, her wrist bent against her waist, and turned on her toes on the grass, twirling cutely. It bugged me. Her movement said, “I’m busy. I’m needed. I have a life.”

  In high school she was scouted at the local mall, and got hired to do some modeling, boat shows, department store fly
ers. Her parents didn’t approve. Her father stocked shelves in a grocery store and died young. Her mom was still living, and also tall. Amy had swum competitively, and set a national record in the short-course two-hundred-meter something. Then came a job in finance, to erase the deprivations of her childhood, and marriage to that jackass who made her a fortune. Then she set her sights on becoming some kind of activist, straddling the classes with money and love.

  Lately she’d been infusing her artwork with one of her charity concerns. The toxic-sludge painting she’d started here last summer showed aquatic life along the Connecticut shore, deformed by PCBs—which, I guess…if you like that sort of thing. Over the winter she’d sent me pictures of another one, more sludge infecting life-giving waters, with these intestinal shapes framing her screwy self-portrait, head too long, one eyebrow raised, a kind of eco-friendly Frida Kahlo thing.

  She turned to me and rolled her eyes. I shrugged like, “Oh well.” She grabbed her throat and stuck out her tongue. I pretended to gag. She motioned to throw the phone in the direction of the bay. Then she hit Mute and said, “It’s beyond partisan politics, but working together to protect our environment I want to thank you all for blah blah—”

  She pressed a button on the phone again.

  “Ugh. Yes honey, sorry, I’m here.”

  When the call ended, she groaned. “We’re trying to get muckety-mucks to buy a table, and if you really want to know, we can’t decide whether to put a seashell in the middle of each table and decorate the seashell with the table number or put the fucking number on a stick.”

  “Oh.”

  “Board service.”

  “You sound bored.”

  “I like to serve on small boards, with a clear give-get, for a year or less.”

  “Whatever that means.”

  “I think it means I have to give them something. Let me tell my assistant the password to my bank account.”

  For a long time, I didn’t think about her money. Then I thought it was ridiculous and disgusting. Although later, I just wanted to get paid. Maybe somewhere in the middle there, for a while anyway, I thought anything was possible, that we were bigger than money, that if we got together, whatever she had would somehow melt away in the heat of our passion. She didn’t wear an engagement ring or fancy clothes, and she carried up from birth a grinding Catholic guilt that equated frugality with goodness. She wore diamond earrings, although her generous earlobes made them look smaller.

  She ended the call and asked how I’d slept, and I asked how her class had gone, her narrative painting workshop. “You look tired,” she said.

  She looked thin. She survived for stretches on Twizzlers and Diet Coke. I studied her chipped fingernails, the part in her hair, until I recognized her, the long thin nose with a knob on the end that I’d kissed, and big gray eyes on either side of her head like an extraterrestrial.

  I should’ve asked more questions, wondered how her kids were, the baby who looked like a monkey and ate bananas, the girl Kaya’s age who never remembered to wear underwear, or the oldest, who’d had a health scare but was fine now. Or maybe it was better to keep things light, so I did my impression of Beanie eating his first solid food, a Cheerio, chewing it for a minute or two before it flipped right onto his chin, entirely whole. And I told her how Kaya made a schedule of the hairdos of her favorite doll, every day there was a different hairdo, but I didn’t go into what they were.

  “That’s cute.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re a good father.”

  I hated this fake chitchat. Before she put the phone away, she showed me a photo of her brand-new bald-headed niece in a pink onesie, with a little pushed-up nose, surrounded by her own children and many other neighbors and nephews and other suntanned people, beside their swimming pool. It was nice to see her older daughter looking healthy, bright-eyed, and beaming.

  “And who’s this?” I asked, but I didn’t care. I let her talk. There were more photos of kids on horseback in the neighbor’s paddock, and girls with juice-stained faces in fancy dresses on the beach at sunset. This one in pigtails was underweight and got gummy vitamins and a chicken leg whenever she came over to play. She lived next door. The mom ignored her but had just bought a $90,000 horse. This boy came to practice piano. He cried if you touched his towel. His dad had moved in with the CrossFit instructor. The lady two doors down had had so much plastic surgery she looked like a marionette. I recognized Amy’s garden, now in bloom, her walkways and meandering stonework. She wanted to move the trampoline so the kids could bounce into the pool, but she worried that if somebody missed the water they’d hit the patio or impale themselves on an umbrella.

  “When a big kid bounces a little kid,” she said, “we call it popcorn.”

  In photos the girls danced around in towels or naked; no one cared. “I just let ’em do whatever.” She’d grown up in a big family with no money and liked to pretend she still lived on the fly. She wanted me to know that she was the real thing, that all the fancy ladies in the neighborhood had been born rich and ignored their kids. One took the infant and the night nurse with her on business trips. The point was, only Amy with her fun yard could protect the children of utmost privilege from abandonment and cushy neglect. “The nannies like hanging with my nanny, they’re all friends, so guess who ends up making lunch for everyone and keeping an eye on the pool?”

  “The pool boy?”

  “You’re getting warmer.”

  “Looks like fun.”

  “Honey, I’m always having fun.” Her eyes narrowed. Seagulls wheeled over us, screeching like monkeys. A single airplane, high up, left a puffy trail.

  “Your pool looks even bigger with the cover off.”

  Her eyes were pale and slitted. “It’s the same.”

  “And your house looks bigger. Have you been feeding it vitamins?”

  “Same pool. Same house.”

  There were voices coming this way, people walking to the flagpole to make phone calls. She’d spent time thinking about this very thing and wanted it settled.

  “It’s not my house. It’s his. He wanted it. He wanted an even bigger place, but I said no.”

  “That’s a beautiful story.”

  I knew all about her lonely life in the big empty house in the woods. I knew what kind of soap she used on her son’s eczema, and the name of her husband’s investment fund, and the humiliating details of their sex life, and how many billions in assets, and his unpublished annual haul. I had a hard time imagining that there was anything left to tell me. I knew she’d played trumpet in the marching band in high school, and spit had run down her chin. She’d told me about the ex-boyfriend who stalked her, the summer after high school ended, finally cornered her, tore her clothes, beat her badly, and probably worse—and how she refused to seek justice or retaliate. She missed her father, he’d died a few months after the attack, and in her mind somehow those awful events were connected. One night, when her second kid was an infant and Amy had a bad stretch, her father appeared to her as a ghost at the foot of her bed. She had a high, hard, shining forehead. Some of her hair had fallen out after each of her kids was born.

  I noticed her cracked lower lip and remembered my mouth on her salty neck, holding her smooth, bony hip. We locked eyes. I felt it zooming through me again. I heard pretty violin music in my head, the back of my throat went soft, I tried to swallow, and wanted to bury my face in her hair.

  A man paced back and forth, talking with one finger in his ear. A white-haired lady stood on the other side of the flagpole in a long denim skirt. “Hello? Hello? Are you there? I’m only hearing parts of what you’re saying.”

  “But you’re doing okay?” Amy asked. “And things are good at home?”

  “Is that a joke?”

  “But how is it for you?”

  “I already told you,” I said. “I gave her everything I had.”

  Amy said, “You’re a good person.”

  “No I’m not.”

/>   “I’m glad I met you, whoever you are.”

  “You look beautiful. I’m glad your daughter’s healthy.”

  She nodded. “She’s at sleepaway camp, hating every minute of it.”

  “You got through it. I knew you were scared.”

  “Yeah, well.” She glanced around. “I started to wonder.”

  “What?”

  “You know.”

  “Huh?”

  “If there was a connection.”

  “To what?”

  “To us. All the emails and everything.”

  “You mean, like, punishment?”

  She looked up, chin raised. “I’m not blaming you.”

  “I understand.” She didn’t want to be mocked.

  In March, a week after I saw her at her house in Connecticut, her oldest kid walked off a soccer field and puked and passed out and almost died. Texts and lengthy emails flowed night and day with no punctuation, starting in mid-sentence, referencing jargon and arguments about emergency surgical techniques to relieve swelling in her daughter’s brain. Then notes from the hospital at all hours, waiting to speak to the doctors. Her husband was in Milan, working on a deal. Then I heard nothing from her for four months, not a word.

  We’d put a lot into our emails. It was a gigantic pain in the ass. If either of us slacked off, the other one got offended. You had to be timely and consistently thoughtful. Although it was nice to know that on nights when I couldn’t sleep, at least someone out there was listening. When I started spiraling into my own black hole, or when Beanie went loco at two A.M., or when Kaya cried because her pillow was too hot, or when the magazine sent back my drawing thirty-seven times for revisions and then killed it, or when I received actual death threats for a cartoon I drew mocking military methods of interrogation, or when the dental surgeon sent me a bill for two thousand nine hundred fucking dollars, or the neighbors hated me because my car blew clouds of whitish-blackish smoke, or when Robin said I tasted like something she had for dinner that she didn’t feel like tasting again, when I thought that nobody would ever want me again, that I’d never crawl into bed with someone and fall into her arms, grateful, protected, in love—I could say it, through that doohickey in my pocket, and by the power of instantaneous electronic transmission it would find her, rising out of a dead sleep in the middle of the night, and she’d zap back a little something to cheer me up, and that would be enough. Giving voice to every thought in my head, having a place for that, meant a lot to me.