Who Is Rich?

by Matthew Klam

“Can you move your fingers?”

  “I can but I don’t want to, but thank you.”

  The slapstick fainting, the bone snapped at nearly mid-forearm, crooked and flopping in the sleeve of her skin, not life-threatening but stomach-churning, her broken summer day, her arm lying in her lap, all of us standing over her as Carl used the security guard’s walkie-talkie. They strapped her to a red steel chair on wheels. I knelt down and attempted to communicate without making known any extramural bond between us.

  “Do you want me to come with you?”

  She shook her head. The whole bottom half of her face was trembling. Sweat or some kind of moisture pooled in her eyes. Carl signed off and handed the radio back to the guard. The hell with it. They wheeled her out.

  Vicky stood beside me, sighing loudly, and when I looked at her she gave me a deep, penetrating stare. When I couldn’t come up with anything to say, she went behind the dugout and started smoking.

  We resumed the game. Other people fell to the ground with injuries. Stan stumbled off the mound, holding his elbow. Luther Voigt pulled a hamstring. During my turn at bat I hit a fizzing pop-up, and felt something go in my back, and couldn’t stand up straight, and walking back to the dugout I used the bat as a cane, and watched from the bench as a string of elderly, scarred, limping septuagenarians hit and ran to the satisfying cheers of our team. I had one decent catch in left off a whistling line drive, and another off a deep fly ball. Both times I thought my legs would crumple and I’d fall to the ground, waiting for those balls to bang into my mitt, but I didn’t.

  In February, I’d spent a week in New Hampshire, freezing to death on the campaign trail, sketching the GOP candidates as they trained their fire on Mitt. The front-runner tried to float above the fray, blaming Obama, smiling with dairy farmers, suggesting that ten million undocumented immigrants self-deport. The same speeches at horrible parties with terrible music and bad food.

  Then in March I spent five days at the trial in Boston of the guy who tried to blow up Faneuil Hall, making drawings of the calm, fat-faced, and deliberate attorney general, of the bearded and scowling bomber, and the stolid and weeping families of victims. I wore credentials on a string around my neck, and got there at dawn to stake out a seat, and had nowhere to put my elbows, and learned about forensics, and a training camp in Yemen, and the destructive power of half a ton of nitroglycerin. After three days, my back was so stiff I couldn’t turn my head, which other members of the media found amusing.

  I finished the assignment and drove south, toward Providence, and a little while later I was following Amy’s directions, imagining her on those roads, thinking that this was wrong and delusional, and also sleazy and immoral, which made me dizzy, but who cares. As I got closer, I thought of how racy it was, that the kind of guy who did this kind of thing was usually more chiseled. Turning deeper into rolling hills, darker woods, I figured I could get caught and lose everything and end up alone in a studio apartment with rodent feces and crackers in my beard. People make you do things you don’t want to do.

  Over the winter, our ten thousand texts and emails had covered a lot of ground—holiday cookie recipes, the tale of the nanny who set the pizza box on fire and almost burned down Amy’s house—but also her hopes, regrets, embarrassments, and lots of stories about the man she’d married. She told me stuff she’d never told anybody, suicidal feelings in college, her father’s last words, a pitch meeting when Henry Kissinger spoke directly to her tits. By the time the weather changed, the novelty had worn off and our communications had hardened into something else, dogged, rambling, what we had for lunch, but also her fittings for ball gowns and other name-dropping tidbits of the .003 percent, the neighbor who bought a 737, the fund manager who poisoned a local river to get rid of some mosquitoes.

  Amy had married a banker who made $120 million a year. He funded tea party candidates and didn’t believe in climate change. She’d left a good career to stay home and raise their kids in style. Sometimes, when he walked into a room, she felt goose bumps rising on her skin, a seething animal hatred, although it hadn’t always been that way. A world-class salesman, he’d sold her a bill of goods. He had a charitable heart, and a hospital in Latvia named after him that always needed cash. He was a soft touch on early childhood education, the third world, the urban poor. Although when I pressed her, she admitted that there were other things they agreed on. The federal government sometimes got in the way. The answer to our stalled economy would come through less regulation, with certain safeguards, which the president didn’t understand because he’d never run a business.

  It was easier to ignore things in an email, elliptical phrases, insinuations. Her friends were generous, too, engaged in civic improvement in the Bronx, in farming projects in Togo. It had a certain logic, billionaires to the rescue, that kind of thing.

  The emailing of our minutiae had a way of leveling the disparity in our fortunes. I told her how much it hurt to step barefoot on a piece of Lego, so she told me how much it hurt to trip over her son’s Exersaucer. We liked to pretend we lived parallel lives. My daughter and Amy’s younger girl, Emily, began worrying around the same time that if their baby teeth fell out, their tongues would fall out, too. How many times did we trade photos of adorable kids in pajamas or the bathtub, or end the night with a few pithy words, “dying for you” or something, that kept me buzzing for hours? How many nights did I lie in bed like a twelve-year-old boy from the pain of a thing so stubborn, imagining her over me, pressing myself flat, the cat draped across my dick, getting a contact high from the waves of desire coming off me—either that or its purring gave me a boner—but it was so real, I found myself whispering, almost touching her, knocking myself out in the dark.

  She grew up in Leominster, Mass., the second oldest of six, or seven. A grandmother with a brogue lived down the hall. The family car had holes in the floor. She made sure I knew where she came from, that she’d had it rougher than me, which wasn’t saying much. Her dad stepped off the boat from Ireland, got drafted into the U.S. Army and shipped to Vietnam, and came home a patriot. Her mom missed Ireland, she thought Americans were crass, but loved nothing more than to sit down on a Saturday night to watch Lawrence Welk. Amy’s favorite sister, Katy, two years younger, married a cop. Her older brother sold fighter jets and missile parts to Taiwan. Lots of sidebars about her other sisters’ knee surgeries and blockages of breast-milk flow, their kids and husbands, their crummy office jobs. High school swimmer, track hurdler, vice president of her senior class. She was attacked the summer after high school ended, in a field beside the town pool. She told me how she thought he meant to kill her, and recalled the boy who found her, and wrapped her in his towel, and brought her home, and cleaned her up.

  She put off college for a year. Worked in a photo lab, took up painting, dated a guy a few years older, but wouldn’t let him touch her. Went to a state school on a swimming scholarship, worked nights on campus security, wearing the orange windbreaker. Majored in econ, spent three years analyzing reports at an institutional bank, swore she’d never considered banking until she took the job. But hers was a small unit within a bigger bank, growing rapidly, and soon they moved her into sales, making presentations in high-yield. The women in her department were tall and good-looking, the men were retired professional hockey players, and they all did vicious things to try to steal one another’s clients. In place of any sort of imagination for a career path, she’d taken the formulaic route to some abstract idea of success, maybe hoping that one day she’d have security. Or a red Lamborghini. Earnest young people were drawn into an abusive, sexist, money-crazed environment, worked to death to prove themselves, to separate out the weak so that the only ones left were greedy, scrappy, stubborn maniacs.

  On the rebound from some long-haired Australian deadbeat, she met whatshisface, Mike. He was tall and dark and strong as an ox. He could work a hundred hours in a row without setting foot outside the building. Even in the short time she knew him, she could see hi
m changing for the worse. She didn’t consider him a friend or a mentor, and he didn’t know how to talk to women. Was he shy? Was he tired? That first Thanksgiving with her family, when he wouldn’t make small talk, she knew it was wrong but went ahead with it anyway. Planned the wedding, got cold feet, refused to back out. Or maybe the Australian guy had mistreated her and Mike was nice at first. I forget. She filled out reams of forms for an annulment, met regularly with her priest that whole first year, trying to figure out how to get out of it, then got knocked up, and was either pregnant or nursing for the next seven.

  Last summer, lying on the beach with her classmates, she wore Italian movie star sunglasses and a white wifebeater, tight against her freckled copper skin, over a screaming blue-and-white flowered bikini, the string loops tied behind her neck as if she’d been dressed that way by some larger being who’d stood over her and tied that bow and then pushed her out into the world. After the beach, a few of us went to play putt-putt golf, where she towered over me by half an inch, and I couldn’t stop looking at her legs.

  On the final night of the conference we skipped the festivities, went to a fancy restaurant, then drove out to the point. She didn’t hesitate, just stripped and ran right into the big booming ocean in the dark. Her bra and undies were white. When we got out of the water I forced myself not to look, forced my eyes up, above her chin. But then I looked. She was breathing strangely, said she hadn’t kissed anyone else in nine years. I noticed her breathing, and looked at her hands, and then it hit me: Duh, she’s shaking, she’s telling the truth.

  This stuff happens in movies all the time, but what’s interesting about real life is that the longer you live, the cornier life becomes, although that corniness, what once seemed corny, now comes from a deeper place. Desperation doesn’t mind corny. Desperation trumps style. We owned the beach, foam breaking around our ankles, delirious and alone in the moonlight.

  Her bunkmates had already gone home, and Amy had the room to herself. There were problems with the lighting, curtains, noises in the hall. Over the next several hours she became awkward, worried, antsy, horny, offended, confused, athletically engaged, panting and moaning, weepy and angry, relieved and exhausted, until we passed out like two crazy drunks. Then, last fall in a bar in the West Village, while trying to wrap her legs around me in the booth, she tipped over a candle and set the table on fire.

  If I took more than three hours to write back she got mad, then quiet, then started leaking sarcastic and manipulative desperation—“Who needs you when I’ve got the weather report?” If I complained about Robin, she flew to my defense. If I wrote something too sexy, she wrote “Lord!” She had an unironic religious side that I had the urge to violate. She ran the Christmas pageant at her church. They used real animals, she put a diaper on the goat, and sometimes bizarre things came out of her, about meeting me “in the afterlife,” or how she sometimes “worried about my soul,” or that she admired Laura Bush “as a mom,” or that she took classes in Broadway tap.

  She wondered if having kids had changed her, made her less tolerant. Maybe she was the problem, not him. She didn’t have patience for someone who wasn’t as small or crazy or helpless, wasn’t as madly in love, who didn’t crawl on the rug and play games or fall apart when she walked out of the room. But then she’d divulge the peculiar terms of her relationship with the guy she referred to in emails as M—who spent half his nights in the city and the rest in the firm’s offices in Frankfurt or Shanghai, or at home behind a locked door at the other end of the house, and made contact with her mostly through his secretary, treating her like an employee, barking orders, or worse, since employees never woke up in the middle of the night with the boss in his underwear standing over their bed—and I couldn’t help thinking that they were both nuts, that money caused it, that rich people had one goal in life, and were creepy and obsessed and not better than anyone.

  She organized events at a school for poor kids and sent me the T-shirt to prove it. She sat beside Mayor Bloomberg at a dinner for twelve, attended birthday parties for the wives of bankers who’d been burned in effigy in recent demonstrations of civil unrest. She did one day in the city every week, on a trading desk, and mentioned in passing that she’d had a short on the euro for so long she could retire to Bali on that money alone. She sent me a hundred dollars last fall, to get a massage when I hurt my neck, and we sent each other a few things around Christmas, sweaters, slippers, gloves, a blouse, though in February she threatened to send me a plane ticket, so that we could meet up at a conference he’d brought her to only to ignore her—in a little town in the French Alps where if you skied down the wrong slope you ended up in Italy, and you had to take a taxi to get back to your hotel. I hadn’t skied in twenty years. She might not have meant it. It’s easier to say stuff when you’re loaded, or when divorce doesn’t land you in a tiny peeling apartment counting change for the laundromat—or maybe she just wasn’t as scared as I was, like that’s how you are when someone really turns your crank, when every single gesture between you is not a marriage transaction or a judgment of who did what or who did wrong.

  South of Providence I headed toward Plainfield, then Norwich, then drove down the coast for an hour. Off the highway it was wooded. As I got closer, the road wound scenically along endless stone walls and dense hedges impossible to see through. The pavement turned to dirt and sometimes went beside a field with a lone horse in the middle, wrapped in a blanket or unclothed, with some big house in the distance that said to all who passed, “Get a load of this, you fucking dirtbags.” I found the mailbox and pressed the button and drove through the gate, and was surprised at how loud the gravel was, and slamming my door I looked up at the house, holy fuck, fieldstone chimneys, big columns on a massive porch.

  In my cursory investigations, Michael Rapazzo’s name had turned up on a list of speakers at some economic summit, and on the board of a dozen companies, and as the founder of a free health clinic in Hoboken, and as the backer of a charter school, or a string of them, mostly for profit, in tax-free public spaces. Three-quarters of the $20 billion he managed came from large pension plans of state employees in Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Cops, firemen, teachers. In 2011 he’d had his best year, and he was up 24 percent in the first quarter of this year.

  He’d also appeared on TV financial news shows once or twice, fending off attacks on private equity, citing a study by some think tank or university, he couldn’t remember, that proved he’d created eight thousand jobs. But I was drawn to his posture of authority; he was conventionally handsome, and I could imagine him mistreating his family in all the ways Amy had mentioned, growling at breakfast, forgetting birthdays, spending Christmas alone in a hotel in Lisbon, falling asleep at dinner. I couldn’t fully assess the debate on carried interest, or whether the companies he’d succeeded in turning around justified the ones he’d accidentally leveraged into bankruptcy, or, more generally, whether bankers should have their intestines wrapped around their throats for wrecking the earth’s economy, but I’d heard from Amy how hard he worked to unlock potential value in undercapitalized industries. I worked just as hard to unlock the business in her pants.

  I knocked, and was relieved to see how ashamed she was. She looked tall and grim and expensive, and as I entered the house it smelled like citrus cleaner and new carpeting. What could she do for me except destroy my little world? The magazine had coughed up a plane ticket but I’d canceled it, adding twenty hours of driving to my already aching back, hoping my car didn’t shit the bed, telling Robin I had to stop in New York for meetings, meetings I didn’t actually have—to do the graphics on a can of dog food—all so I could make this sordid little detour. Although I hadn’t texted Amy until the night before, since I hadn’t been sure how long my work would take, how many days I’d need at the trial in Boston. There had also been the distinct possibility that I would chicken out, which left me feeling less ashamed and disgusted.

  Her hair was darker, her fro
nt teeth were big and white and slightly crossed on the ends. She wore a gray turtleneck. She’d written back that she had a lunch date, housepainters were there, and her younger daughter had to be picked up at one. We’d have an hour or less, but yes, she’d said, please come. Anyway, I had my own kids to get home to. Beanie had his first cold, and Robin was covered in hives from exhaustion. I wanted to get off the highway and sniff their heads.

  Amy led the way, not saying much. The kitchen was long and white, with a couch in a bay window and a dog on the floor sweeping its tail. Annabelle was a rescue mutt and Amy’s best friend. The ceilings were eighteen feet high. In the space above our heads you could hang hammocks, rope swings. The marble island was the size of my kitchen and covered with stacks of home design magazines, cookbooks, baskets of fruit, onions, pads of stationery, phone chargers, mail, a box of essential oils, a basket of ribbons, scissors, a stack of delicate-looking white bowls that, when I touched them, turned out to be made of rubber. The island was entrenched with things that could’ve gone in a drawer, Scotch tape, stapler, pie weights, cutting boards, a pewter mug of unsharpened pencils. It looked like the staging area for a yuppie war.

  The doorknobs, drawer pulls, light fixtures, and color schemes were bright and coherent. Somebody had baked a crust in a casserole dish that sat on the counter, although I didn’t know if that someone was her; I wasn’t sure what she did all day, between the philanthropic commitments and the mommy stuff she claimed to live for, rocking her son in the middle of the night, building a tree house, standing in a pool all afternoon teaching the girls how to dive. What she did in the way of housework and how it resembled what went on in my house I never figured out. On this very day she had a list of things that needed her immediate attention: a local art museum pre-gala speech had to be written to rally the host committee, the lunch in town she couldn’t cancel with the sub-Saharan head of Oxfam, and then she was taking her kids to the park. On slow days, she tutored in math at the after-school program they funded in town. She’d been to the hospital they’d built in Macedonia and wanted to go back. She also managed some pile of money. She worried about the Fed’s monetary policy watering down the dollar. At Christmas they’d gone somewhere in the Caribbean I’d never heard of. In February she’d skied Chamonix.