by Matthew Klam
The pleasure of seeing my experience represented here came at me in a rush and my pen moved fast, zip, zip, no guessing, no stopping, everything where it should be, extraneous details excised, coastline neatened and simplified. A little wooden biplane flew in the vast expanse over the ball field, towing a banner: FLOOPSTEIN COLLEGE SUMMER ARTS CONFERENCE.
I started a comic strip, thumbnailing panels, this woman, this man, they meet, have a fling, fall in love. A year later they’re back. Ideas came pouring out and I worked sure and fast, the way I had when I’d first started drawing comics, before I knew what I was doing, when everything came easily, in one draft, and there were no consequences, or there were but I didn’t know it yet. I wanted to tell the story of my affair and, in the process, explain how I’d lost my way, what I’d done for love, for fatherhood, for the sake of good material. This comic would retroactively validate my years of making nothing. I could work on it in my free time, and surprise my publisher, and in four or five months I’d push thirty-two pages out into the world, and Robin would read it and throw me out of the house. In a year, I’d be halfway done. In three years, I’d have a book. I’d cough it up—the ugly, urgent truth—and deal with the fallout later.
I sketched the cover and titled it “What I Did at Summer Camp,” in a woodsy font made of logs, and along the margin I drew a quick approximation of my own disembodied head, inside a sunburst, a corona with lines radiating, and beneath that I drew Marilyn Michnick’s face, smiling, cockeyed with crooked glasses, and Mohammad Khan, sweaty and pleading for relief, and Tabitha Portenlee, and Vicky Capodanno, and Alicia Hernandez Roulet’s ugly little dog, and gave each character a new name and a brief bio: “Vivian Friedman, expert on Florentine sculpture,” “Ali El-Amir, prone to heat rashes,” “Magdalene Tonsilman, interested in gambling and incest,” “Emily Carbona, can’t quit smoking,” and “Sméagol, the walleyed goblin.”
I made some notes about my doppelgänger—a cranky art director—his constraints and encumbrances, his seascape painting hobby, his family back home, with a vague similitude to Robin and my kids, changed their names, flipped their sexes, older boy, younger girl. In a box beneath the notes I scribbled, “The Adventures of Clark Kornblatt, Advertising Executive, Artist, Lover, Sportsman, Husband, Father, Adulterer,” and “Costarring Natasha Monaghan-Rinaldi, Rich Lady from Connecticut, Hasn’t Had Sex Since the Mesozoic Period.”
Then I sat there and rested, and looked it over. An encounter at an arts conference. A woman of means and her dingbat boyfriend. Underlying theme: monogamy blows. Jeezum, how bold. I lay back against the sand and thought about cheating, until it became unbearable.
Back in town I walked my bike along the pier, past tugboats, by the ferry landing, and took in the stench of the commercial fleet, game-fishing boats, rusty trawlers. I fiddled with my phone, hoping for a text from Amy, and dropped it in the street. I hadn’t gotten a signal in two days. I wished they’d put up some cell towers in this stinking fishy hellhole.
Sometimes out here it seemed that the wind would blow a signal into your phone, and suddenly you had messages from hours or days ago. I squinted down into my hand, holding it at a delicate angle. Had she been carrying her phone? Please text me already, goddammit! Fuck. I walked my bike down Main Street because it was too crowded to ride, gawking and depressed, staring too hard at everything.
The town in summer was many things. It had beautiful light. The sky always changing. The breeze softly luffing. The sun like a hand resting gently on your shoulder. The buildings old and practically falling into the ocean, the streets narrow and crooked, walled in by Victorian B&Bs with fancy paint jobs and front yards heaving with wildflowers. Rainbow flags on every corner celebrated tolerance and diversity, the freedom to love. This place had been known at one time or another for whale hunting, Portuguese immigrants, sand dunes, herring shoals, shipwrecks off the point, but also for a certain kind of seeker or desperate kook, Puritans, dropouts, communists, frazzled intellectuals, painters from New York, experimental-theater types, alcoholic fishermen, sailors stationed here between the wars, stubborn or demented individuals hoping to escape persecution. It was seen as a haven for artists, a place of open-mindedness, and throughout the world for the last hundred years as a center of unconventional living, as a gay summer resort.
Two men ate ice cream cones in booty shorts under a sign advertising a drag show, beside a store selling taffy, a store selling kitchen gadgets. A guy in tight teal jeans drank coffee with a woman with jingly gypsy sandals outside a bar smelling of fried oysters. An elderly woman with gray dreadlocks buzzed by in an electric wheelchair led by dogs in rainbow collars. In this town even dogs could be gay. A massive shirtless guy with gold nipple rings in a Viking helmet wove through pedestrians on a booming Harley with a ferret in a crate wearing little goggles. Where did they come from? Would they ever go home? If I stood here forever, and the human traffic never ended, I could let it pass through me and live as a ghost and never have to think about myself again.
I locked my bike next to a cluster of bikes and followed the flow of traffic through a covered arcade, past a children’s boutique, and entered a jewelry shop behind two men with matching sunglasses, matching sideburns, matching pectorals. I put my hands all over everything. I thought Robin would like one of these bracelets, and with the help of an easygoing and solicitous clerk, I found the exact one on black leather twine with a waxy finish, strung through a half dozen large, metallic, shimmering black pearls.
The men walked out and the older woman who’d been helping them joined the clerk beside me. From this distance, Robin couldn’t do anything to stop me. I’d worked hard to earn these precious funds to buy a gift she didn’t want or need, to signify my love.
We tried several bracelets on the young woman’s lovely wrist but kept coming back to the nicest one. Robin’s ingratitude and insults, her slights about my earnings, her sexual inattention, were beside the point. Or maybe they weren’t. I’d show her. It happened quickly. I thought it said $300; $300 would’ve been a stupid waste of money, but then I noticed the third zero. I’m still not sure why, but when my credit card was declined, I pulled out our debit card in a state of almost total disbelief, and wiped out our checking account.
Back out on the street, I passed two women with matching silvery-blond crew cuts, rollerblading by with clomping strides. I read the receipt. No returns allowed except for store credit. I took in long, damp sheets of breath, to keep from blacking out. That made it worse. It erased my salary for the conference and then some. After our house and car and first child’s emergency cesarean birth, this was more money than I’d blown on anything in my life. I passed an immensely tall, fabulous-looking drag queen, and a little skinny gum-chewing drag queen, flyering the crowd in the hours before their shows. I attempted to interpret my irrational action. Had I ever done this kind of thing before? No. A life in the arts requires vigilance and restraint. Was my behavior out of character? Yes, technically, and also terrifyingly, although it was possible that this was merely the culmination of a period of interior deadness and anger, that something had been building for months, or years, that the recent and ongoing stresses had pushed me over the edge. I tried to figure it out. Robin would be stunned into something beyond hatred, more like fear. She’d think I lost my mind. This was the kind of thing borderlines did before they burned down the house.
Pedicabs and kids on bikes fought for space on Main Street with muscle boys in packs and day-trippers and families with small children hauling beach stuff, imported Bulgarian teenagers rushing to work for an hourly wage, women who looked like librarians, wrapped in each other’s embrace. They were happy, proud, and in love. I’d just spent the amount we’d saved to send our daughter to pre-K in the fall on a piece of waxed leather strung with stuff made by a mollusk. Whatever other cash we had coming was already set aside for regular expenses, to be disbursed during a weekly, unpleasant, nauseating triage of deciding what got paid first. A small blue velvet bag had
been placed inside a white paper bag, and I held it tightly in my grip and continued my stroll down Main. I needed to gather myself and return the bracelet. If I had to murder everyone in that store, they would refund my money.
Health-food store, bait and tackle, taffy store, war monuments along the town green, motels, bars, benches full of gawkers, sipping espresso in little paper cups, big rusty anchor mounted on cement. Across the street, beside a sandwich board advertising tonight’s cabaret, a big, blond frightening drag queen in a full-length white sheath joked with tourists, hawking her wares. A massive white clapboard building with black shutters and a witchy-looking clock tower, the town hall, cast a cool shadow across the green. There were police cars lined up along the wide front steps, a familiar-looking ambulance parked there, too—like an ice cream truck, clean and white with red and yellow—and beside it, a small brown building with partly tattered shingles, with a brown wooden sign that read, OUTER BEACHES MEDICAL CLINIC.
I crossed the street. I’d gone in there once for a band-aid and they had shellacked swordfish hanging on the walls. The real hospital was an hour away. She’d think I was harassing her. But wasn’t I also her friend? Who would turn their back on a friend at a time like this? I went up the wooden stairs.
Inside, the waiting room was windowless but bright, fluorescent lights pulsing overhead. I passed a woman in a bathing suit jiggling a baby, and an old man with his arms folded across his chest. At the nurses’ station, three people in scrubs were quietly typing and filing papers. I walked down the hall, past examination rooms with the doors ajar, some ogre coughing to death in the first one, a kid screaming in the next one, and at the end of the hall found a curtain; it was white and looked disposable, with a foot of mesh at the top. I stood on my toes and peered through the mesh.
Amy lay on a gurney, wide-eyed, head to the side, jaw hanging open like a drunk’s. I felt sad and achy and sorry this thing had happened to her, and at the same time a little fascinated and unmoved and almost unable to believe it was real. A man in scrubs stood over her, medium build, angry complexion, receding curls.
“Every break is different,” he told her. “Some people come in sobbing and begging for morphine. Others, like you, hold it together.”
She licked her lips and said, “I gave birth to three kids without drugs.”
“Well,” he said, and sat on a stool and turned his back to her and began very nerdily measuring strips of white stuff, cutting and laying the strips on the table. I thought he was talking to himself, then realized he was telling the nurse how he planned to manipulate the break back into place.
“Because what you usually get in some Podunk town on a Saturday,” he said, turning back to Amy, “is a medical assistant who’s never done one of these before, so you have to wait for the surgeon to get off his boat and get in here.” Then he gave a nod to the nurse. He mentioned a Something splint to deal with the swelling, then ice and elevation, and a new compression splint ten days from now, depending.
Another nurse pushed past me and threw back the curtain. I followed her in. Burt Feeney, the provost of the college, sat in the corner. He got the call if anything happened on campus—public urination, fire alarm, underage conference participant naked in the lacrosse dorm at three A.M. Behind him hung a poster of Diseases of the Digestive System. The doctor moved past Burt to check the X-rays on a light box on the wall. Burt called the doctor Henry. Amy turned to me as though she knew I’d come, and I thought, Don’t do anything, don’t scare her. I looked at her as though I’d known her all my life. Her T-shirt had ridden up against her armpits, against her boobs, and her plaid shorts were twisted and her face hung to the side. Her T-shirt looked soft. When I looked at her, it softened me. I stood there, staring like a creep. She was mine. She had been all along. There was dirt on her socks from the base path, and an IV in her good arm, but the puffy orange thing they’d put around her other arm on the field was gone, the arm lay there on a silver tray, bare and still, deformed.
“Does it hurt?” I loved her and wanted to tell her.
She shook her head and seemed to go away. She seemed a bit high on goofballs. Her eyes closed and her eyebrows went up like some bored waitress’s. When she came back she said, “I have a distal radial fracture with displacement.”
The nurse unwrapped some rolls of gauze. “Folks,” she said, to try to clear the room. I had to back up to let Feeney pass. He knew me from dealings at school, and gave me a friendly nod, like, “Look who’s here, one of our depraved faculty members.”
He taught marine bio and gave tours of the lab he helped run, out on the shoals—I went my first year here, forty-five minutes by boat, in the rain. His students warned us about the dangers of overfishing the Hamanausett Bay, then Burt got up on a milk crate and talked for two hours about the seals he tagged, a steady stream of water running off his hat, and I wanted to shoot him with a tranquilizer gun and implant a radio in his head. He’d actually been born in this town, and was tall and stooped with a gray beard and the accent of some Nova Scotian cod farmer. His wife, Edna, gave lectures every summer on heightened feeling in paintings of the late rococo period, and had a gonzo Afro like Phil Spector’s, which was probably fine if you lived here year-round.
The nurse yanked back the curtain again, and another nurse, a tech, brought in a machine. The doctor spoke in a voice so gentle he seemed to be pretending. “What I’ll do now,” he said, “is administer the local.” Then he gave Amy an injection right at the point of the break, the needle hunting inside, the doctor angling the syringe athletically, and I almost puked. I stood beside Burt, just beyond the curtain. Amy sighed, and moved her tongue around as her eyes bopped across the ceiling. He loaded up the syringe and did it again, a little higher.
Then he left, and the tech set up her machine while the nurse complained to the tech about how far away she lived, on a military base an hour inland. The tech was slower, quieter, with purple-powdered eyelids. They were waiting for the lidocaine, five more minutes. Then they walked out and stood down the hall.
“She slipped on second base,” I told Burt, “because nobody nailed it down.” Behind my words was the threat of litigation, but he didn’t care. He wore a faded T-shirt with a turtle on it, with the name of his environmental alliance, and the biggest green shorts you ever saw, army surplus, with the fly not completely zipped.
“You don’t have to stay,” I said. “I can do it.” I’d come to rescue her. He took out a red bandanna and blew his nose so it honked.
“Okay.” He put away the hankie and went down the hall, tilting to one side like an old seaman. At the end of the hall he met the doctor, who put an arm around Burt’s shoulders. I felt dizzy and alert.
Despite the local color—smelly artists who lived in unelectrified dune shacks, transvestite parades, stores selling cock rings—the town itself had the narrowness of an isolated colonial fishing village. The locals hated you, the annual scourge, the six-day summer renter in search of local flavor. You could see it in the backs of their eyes when you asked them what time high tide was, or between their teeth when you walked across the dunes through the plover habitat. Somewhere around Memorial Day the streets became too crowded for a car to pass, and every week after that the town’s population doubled, and by the time I got here the locals were in retreat and droves of idiots were going around in those funny lobster hats with claws and jiggly eyeballs or trying to kill you in their avocado-colored Mercedes-Benzes on some crooked side street laid out in 1690 and not much wider than a bridle path; they strode in and out of restaurants and stores selling overpriced crap nobody on earth could actually afford. I bet Burt was sick of the whole thing. I didn’t blame him. I’m saying I understood.
Then he came back down the hall and asked how I planned to get her back to campus. I said I didn’t know. He smiled like he didn’t care either way, and leaned through the curtain and called out, “Feel better, Amy,” and said he’d see me at the fundraiser that night, one of those cocktail parties
that all faculty were required to attend.
Up close, she looked a little loopy. I took the stool the doctor had been sitting on and brought it to her bedside.
“How is it?”
“Eh.” Her voice had that nasal breaky tone of a drugged person not exactly keeping it together.
“I was worried,” I said, as though I’d walked through a blizzard, calling every hospital within a hundred miles. Her cheeks were red, like those of a kid who’d woken up from a deep sleep under heavy blankets. “You’ll be relieved to know that I’m a doctor, although unfortunately I did my training in cartooning. Now, what seems to be the problem?” I touched her knee. “Does this hurt?”
“Will you cut it out.”
“You’re not left-handed by any chance?”
“No.”
“Hey, how many more bones were you planning on breaking this week? Because if this keeps up, I’ll have to find someone else to play the accordion.”
Her face twitched. “I’m going home.” She wiped her eyes. “The nurse had to zip me up when I went to the toilet.” Tears ran down and hung on her nostrils. “I can already see my kids going pooey if I can’t string beads for Pretty Pretty Princess.”
The bracelet sat in a blue velvet pouch, inside a white paper bag, on my lap.
“Stay. You can still go to class.”
“And do what?”
“Listen. Soak it in.”
“I’m not really a painter. I just pretend. You’re the artist.”
“Well, your kids will survive without you. Your nanny can handle it.”
“Yeah, except it’s hard to get good help from eight thousand miles away.” Her sister had the kids until Tuesday. Amy had sent Perlita back to the Philippines to see her own kids. Then she sniffed her tears in, and I started to feel responsible, entangled, whatever. I held out the box of Kleenex, took the wet tissue when she finished, and threw it away.
