Who Is Rich?

by Matthew Klam

  She rolled her head from side to side, grimacing. She asked me to take out her earrings. “Deep breaths,” I said, leaning across her face, touching the sun-damaged creases on her neck. I fixed the pillow. Her eyes went wild.

  “Why did you come to the hospital?”

  “I was worried about you.”

  “Bullshit. You walked by accidentally.”

  “What the fuck. I thought you wanted me to leave you alone. You stopped talking to me for four months.”

  “What the fuck do you think I’m doing here?” She started sobbing again. “I came back for you. I wore my cigarette pants to dinner last night for you, I didn’t see you anywhere, I had to sit with some old lady and talk about the barbecue sauce!” But I’d looked for her too, and looked for her again at breakfast. “I can’t stand it!” She said something about Mike in Frankfurt, gasping in a shaky voice. “I can’t live this way anymore. I can’t be alone all the time and then treated like shit.”

  I had the creeping awareness that since March I’d secretly wished her ill, imagined some degrading payback for how she’d boxed me out, for everything, the incidental bragging, about her luncheon with Sting’s wife, Trudie, how she got trapped inside a ball gown alone at home and had to cut herself out with a bread knife, but this display of misery had already exceeded my fantasies of revenge. Her eyes had sunk into her head, her skin was greenish and sliding off the plates of her skull.

  “ ‘Mommy, are you sad you married Daddy? Does he wish he had no children? Does he hate us?’ Emily asks me that now. It’s so horrible.” He hadn’t made one piano recital this year, no soccer games, swim meets, parents night, nothing. He missed the birth of their youngest kid, plain forgot and went golfing. Didn’t have a single question for Lily’s surgeons. “They’re going in there to save our kid’s life with an experimental procedure and he couldn’t take his head out of the bag”—“the bag” being a derogatory term for the soft briefcase he carried with him, even on canoeing trips, filled with balance sheets for upcoming deals. “I asked the questions! I made the call!” The memory of it seemed more painful than the arm. I took out a third pill in case it got worse, and held it in my sweaty fingers as the coating came off and the thing turned gummy in my hand. “Every night of my life I have to read until I’m unconscious, or else I lie there and worry that I’ll die, and all they’ll have left is him.”

  “You’re not dying.”

  “He’ll hire some pole dancer to raise them. Maybe she’ll let him stick it up her ass.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “One day you’ll hear I’m dead, and you’ll be sad but you’ll be happy, too!”

  “No I won’t.”

  “You never knew how much you mattered to me.”

  “You mattered to me, too.”

  Between gasps, her breathing quieted. I touched her forehead with the palm of my hand and promised she’d be home soon, and rubbed the decomposing pill in my other hand. She calmed down and rolled onto her side, and made a soft, hoarse, muffled whimper, like an infant fighting a nap. There was no way to get the bracelet off her now.

  My pain was like hers, from wanting her all this time, from wanting out, from being trapped, from wanting life. We made the motions of living but we were dying in a hurry. Soon I’d be gone and my kids would grow old and they’d croak, too. It was a knot, a loop, twisting and choking me off from what I needed, from life. You don’t even know, but you’re dying right now. She was quiet. I ate the pill.

  Below the open window I heard people in the parking lot. Out in the bay, a lone sailboat crawled along the razor line of the horizon. I heard “Call Me Maybe” ringing in the courtyard. A moment later I felt my sinuses release. I took in huge gulps of seaborne air. I tasted life on my tongue. My lips cracked. My mouth was as dry as a chalkboard. The stitch in my back from softball, or from that crappy mattress in the Barn, or from yesterday’s nine-hour drive, which had crippled me, was gone. I’d been gritting my teeth, trying to outrun it, but hadn’t realized it. The drug came over me in surges of undulating serenity. She closed her eyes, so I took another pill and choked it down.

  Light came in waves, sound came in waves. Cicadas out the window sounded like distant machinery.

  “It’s numb,” she said, touching her splint. I had a similar thing going on with my face. I drifted in and out, alert but adrift, in love with mankind. The lower parts of us rhythmically dry-humped. I’d crawled into bed with her at some point. My heart beat time with nature’s green machine. I understood the language of insects. I thought this was the most beautiful little room on earth, and humped her harder, the two of us crammed in together on her twin bed. I felt a cool sensation around my mouth. It was drool. I was drooling. She broke her thumb once playing field hockey, something else happened skiing, I wasn’t listening.

  It wasn’t just the ache in my back. My whole helmet was gone, the whole case of mistaken identity that had chained me to the furnace in my basement for the last five years, the whole doomed, provisional future, the sodden memories of rancorous domesticity: poof. I’d drawn a new circle where the head had been.

  Out the window an Evian banner chased an airplane across the bay. “Gangnam Style” rang out in the courtyard. I felt sluggish, a little queasy, like a sick kid in heavy pajamas. I slipped my hand in, stroking and cupping her everywhere. Amy leaned back and opened her mouth and reached up with her good hand to feel my face.

  “Nobody touches me except my kids. No hands on me, no skin against mine.”

  “Same deal at my house,” I said.

  Thoughts of Robin back home raced in and I forced them out, and told her how happy I’d been all those months, to have someone lighting up my phone night and day, thinking I mattered, like sugar in my veins. A good day meant steady updates and flirty pics or news of my appearance in her dreams and fantasies, and a bad day meant no word at all, and when we cut off communication my world went dark, so I talked to her in my head, like a lunatic, the same way she did with me. I listed my favorite photos of her, the one at a fancy lawn party in a short dress, pretending to shoot herself in the head out of boredom, the one of her on a sled with kids on her lap, and the one in pink undies. I recounted her nighttime phantom visitations, and how I could feel her actual body, hear my bed creak, feel her warm weight upon me, her knowing hands and pliant parts, her voice hissing in my ear. Either you’ve been there and know or you haven’t and think I’m nuts, but I swear, it happened. I told her how the thought of Lily’s surgery made me cry, how I’d worried about her kid until my head hurt and prayed in my own unaffiliated way for her to pull through. I felt ashamed in confessing, and Amy reached up and whacked me so hard with her splint, it folded and crunched my ear like a bag of Cheetos. But it was an accident, and only meant to be a loving caress. It didn’t hurt at all. Every gland in my body felt fine. Her teeth banged into mine as she worked my mouth with hers.

  “You know,” she said, pulling back, “it’s hard to take a picture of your own butt.”

  “I wondered about that.”

  “You wave it over your shoulder and hope for the best.”

  “You had good results.”

  Her hand lay between us, the fingers turning blue. She slurped at the saliva gathering at the corners of her mouth.

  “Oh God.” She’d been smiling. “Do other people do this kind of thing?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s what I keep telling myself.”

  The air grazed my skin like velvet. The drug made me feel like a long-eared gnome. I decided to remove my shorts. Underage shoplifting and vandalism, passing out drunk at the wheel and totaling my father’s car, knocking up my high school girlfriend, knocking up another girlfriend in college, abortions, miscarriages, loose finances, unrealistic or laughable ambitions, wild statements in art and in life, flushing away all of our money for the thing gently rotating on a rich lady’s wrist—these were impulsive acts or the unintended consequences, nothing earth-shattering, but here was another one. I felt st
upider in my underwear, and lifted the hem of her T-shirt, and yanked it over her head.

  She was bigger and longer than ever. Her bra was padded, cinnamon-colored, with a wire in it. I knew she was ashamed, that she never took it off for him. I knew everything, and followed her nipples around the room until I nearly fainted. The soft arc at the bottom of her breasts described what they’d been, full, on a broad frame that matched her collarbones. Her nipples were small and cute and tasted metallic. Her skin was softer than Robin’s, although Robin’s was pretty soft. Her underwear was nude with scratchy lace, and she lifted her hips and I threw them on the floor.

  “That’s it,” she breathed wildly. She wanted to be naked, wanted to be stripped. “Let’s make a bet,” she said. “And if I win, you have to come with me and my kids to Disney World.” She touched me with a silky, absentminded caress.

  “And if I win, you have to dance around the room naked.”

  “We’ll get Mickey ears and binge on Twizzlers.” Her index finger and thumb lazily circled my business, as if she’d read in a Vatican-approved periodical how to apply the minimum of wifely contact to satisfy the required manipulation, though it seemed that between her hand and her brain there was that characteristic disconnect I’d grown used to during intervals of our intimate engagement. Like the hand was into it, even though the head instructed the hand to chill and maintain a demure proportion of modesty.

  “Or go someplace out west, with little cabins.”

  “I missed you.”

  “Can we talk about what happened?”

  “I never should’ve gone to your house in March. That was a bad idea.”

  The mention of it seemed to derail her. “When you left that day, I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to tell someone, ‘That was my boyfriend. We just broke up.’ ” She must’ve meant her housekeepers. She never mentioned anyone else. They shared a bedroom in her basement: Perlita, who wiped the baby’s ass, and the Salvadoran woman who’d lost her restaurant in the economic crash and now did laundry for a living, and the nanny with scars on her face who babysat on weekends and cleaned the rest of the time.

  “For the last two weeks I kept thinking about coming back here, jumping out of my gourd. Not just excited but also sort of crazy and sad and mean to everyone.”

  And Tammy, who rolled into the driveway every morning at five o’clock to give Mike his private yoga lesson before his driver showed up to take him to the helipad so he could fly into the city, or to Teterboro, to his waiting jet.

  “Abusive and whiny and selfish, didn’t want to do after-school pickup or read to them at night or cook anything or walk the dog. I didn’t want to come here, and I didn’t want to stay home.”

  “I’ve been a nervous wreck, too.”

  “I wanted to tell him.”

  “Great idea.”

  “I think he figured it out.”

  “How?”

  “He only digs me when I’ve got something to look forward to.” She wiped the corners of her mouth with a sleepy gesture. “Not just him. Strangers try to talk to me. Babies think they know me. The guy at the meat counter kept carrying my bags to the parking lot, directing traffic so I could pull out.” I pictured her, bouncing around the supermarket with an expectant, wide-eyed look, a broad-shouldered, pigeon-toed, six-foot-tall lady.

  “Anybody else?”

  “Then I get home with the groceries and this guy I barely know is trying to rip my clothes off.”

  “I thought he was in Germany.”

  “He left on Sunday.”

  “I thought he was always too tired to want sex.”

  “Not always.”

  “Or distracted by work.”

  “I was thinking of you the whole time, although you’re nothing like him.”

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “Rips my clothes off, no kissing, bend over, no talking.” Even on drugs it hurt to listen. “I forget where he’d been, Wisconsin maybe. He got home early. I guess he was excited to show me how healthy his prostate was or something. It was awful.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Finally, when I couldn’t get him off me, I told him about you.”

  “I can’t tell if you’re being serious.”

  “Not your name but I told him I was going away, which of course he didn’t remember, and that I was going to see you, which he didn’t believe, and it turned him on even more.”

  “I guess that explains how he knew.”

  “And when he finished he gave me a present.”

  “How thoughtful.”

  “He gives me stuff, trinkets or wads of cash.”

  “But this actually happened, or are you kidding? I’m still confused.”

  “Like jewelry, nice stuff.” She reached up and touched an earlobe. “Where’d they go?”

  I had no idea what I’d done with her earrings. The bracelet had two dangly pieces with pearls knotted at the ends that clacked together.

  “Did he hurt you?”

  “Nah.”

  “Well then, how much money would he give you, typically?”

  “Like I robbed a bank.” I tried to imagine it. “Although fifteen percent of his business is in my name, so it’s my money, too.”

  “But, like, give me a ballpark figure.”

  “I don’t care.” She turned serious, although her eyes went in different directions. “I’ve tried everything. I’ve tried getting blitzed. It doesn’t work. I even thought about hypnosis.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “One day I’ll have something better, maybe not with you, but I will. You don’t have to come to Disney World with me if you don’t want to.”

  “I do. I said I’ll go to Disney World!” I felt this wild state of believing, familiar and illusory but stronger than ever. She hugged and kissed me. I didn’t know whose drool was whose. She tried swallowing my face. I fought back as best I could. The first time in these dorms it had been innocent and authentic, an unpremeditated falling in love. But this time it was more ominous and bewildering. We smooched until our faces melted. I opened and pressed back her knees, kissing her ribs, the cool sveltish bones of her. She flung her head back and I smooched her belly, waggling two fingers slowly into her. I slid down, breathing underwater, and squished my tongue around and around. Her legs jolted and she heaved and wriggled. I had trouble breathing but it was good to shut her up with my tongue, to gag myself with her, to steer her long legs as they banged against my head. My tongue got tired and the muscles in my head ached, and cramped up, and turned to stone. I might’ve passed out but my tongue kept going. I felt her pulse beating against my lips, her body vibrating from her moans, her hips rising and me going up, dropping down, holding on, wrapping my arms around her.

  “It keeps going!”

  Then I lay there with my cheek on her stomach, catching my breath, listening to her breathe.

  “Holy moly.” And a minute later: “Nobody’s gone down on me since college!”

  She didn’t want to stop. “Hey, can you keep doing that while I do this?” She used her fingers on herself while I used my tongue. Her hips bounced, her knees cupped and clattered against my head, my arms wrapped around her, hanging on. “Oh, I need this in my life!” Then more noises, then gasping for air, then she cried while coming, just like last year, and pulled me up and wrapped herself around me.

  “Oh, thank you, bunny.”

  “Sure.” What the fuck? I wanted her to respect me, not call me “bunny.” Then I thought of Mike, a hundred pounds heavier than her, throwing cash or jewelry on the bed after he finished. Then I remembered the high school ex-boyfriend. In relationships, I read somewhere, men feared being humiliated, while women feared being murdered. Although it didn’t seem to be part of her, and really, I admired how she refused to let a bad thing define her, didn’t seem to be trying to heal some wound or deal with it in any overt or subconscious way. I admired that strength, the fighter in her, how she’d survived and moved on. Although maybe by refusing
to deal with it, she got stuck reenacting it in some endless looping karmic nightmare.

  A moment later I felt her good hand tugging on my ass, her foot curled around the back of my thigh, the tendon pulling and drawing me to her, her clublike appendage banging and scratching the back of my head. A trail of saliva ran down the side of her face. I wasn’t about to cut diamonds with this thing, but with some angling and shoving I found a way to squish it inside her.

  “Is that okay?”

  “Mmm.”

  I got it moving. It worked. I’d been hoping for this, although not exactly this, but I felt held, I felt home. I went into her arms and peeled off my hairy defenses. Robin and I had been screwing for twelve years. We had no idea what we were doing anymore or why. Amy and I had been at it for two minutes on controlled substances and were already spiritually entwined. We were smiling and looking at each other like, Holy shit. I had trouble imagining the awful things she’d been through. Everything but this was in the past.

  This was how you did it. You fell in love. You thought about her hourly. You waited for a year. You waited until she asked. I’d been screwing since high school but had had no idea what it was until that moment. Once she asks, you pass it to her. Then she passes it back to you. It’s an agreement. You have to ask for it and she has to ask for it. When the vote is unanimous, she passes it back for all women, for the business of the human race, fully aware that time started with this action, an engine lying in the cave of our furry relatives before man arrived. She was smiling. I was like, Thank you, God. The worst sex is a crime that shouldn’t define you. The best sex in life is tough to predict and hard to explain.

  How weird was it that the closer I got, the lighter I felt, the drunker I felt, the weaker I felt, the more unfiltered or unmasked or honest or in love, the smaller I felt, the less I felt I had to bring, to defend myself, the more easily she could take me, devour me, allow me to disappear inside her. I started to shake, my arms were tired, and she shuddered and I shook back and we held on like two crazy poodles, shaking and trembling. I pushed only half the time, and the other half she pulled, she drew me in, and I was taken up, the cord stretched taut between us, one breath, one body, one of us. Then no one breathing, then looking at each other and madly kissing. Then the pattern again. One. One. One. If I could feel the pattern, I could stay with it indefinitely.