by Matthew Klam
“Oh.”
I’ve got her now, she’s mine now.
“Ohh.” I’m holding her, I’m in her arms, I’m banging Amy, I’m coming inside a beautiful mother.
That kind of orgasm is inexplicable and impossible to duplicate. It leaves you grateful and mystified, altered and plural, selfless and boundless, winded and imprinted with her soul. She curled into my arms, resting her head on my chest, eyes closed. “Oh, bunny,” she said, and drew her knees into her chest. We stayed that way for a while. Eventually, I asked if she was okay. She’d curled into a ball like a pill bug.
“What am I doing?”
I struggled to process it analytically. Although heavily suppressed and encased in narcotic batting, even I could see where this was headed.
“I’m never reckless. I tried to leave.”
I stood and was able to put on my clothes. Other responses occurred to me: loss of control of my arms and legs, sudden convulsions, and outbursts of crying.
“I’m bad.”
“You said that last summer.”
“We’re crazy.” I found one sneaker under the bed. “I didn’t come for this. I came to see your face. I wanted company.” I had to toss her clothes around to find the other shoe. “We’re out of control.”
She fell back and cradled her arm. It wasn’t entirely the same as last year: she didn’t directly blame me or say she was going to hell, and her tears might’ve been residual and were certainly in line with recent events. It was certainly not unexpected, and a percentage of her response remained in flux, as she opened her eyes and looked searchingly and even reached out her good hand toward me, maybe moving at an asymmetrical rate to the level of normative discomfort, adjusted for the incongruence of overlapping historical, psychosocial, and physiological—
There was an explosion that rattled the windows.
Maybe it had nothing to do with me. Then another explosion. When I left she was looking at her splint.
On my way across campus from Amy’s dorm there were several more explosions. Every day at five o’clock some nutjob out in the harbor fired a cannon off a sailboat to signal the beginning of happy hour. I walked to the flagpole and called home, twice, then gave up and headed to the Barn. The broken arm. The bracelet disaster. Then my wife tried to kill my kids, and I fucked a plutocrat. Things were definitely out of whack. In the parking lot, two guys were painting stage sets. Past the windmill I fell in behind some people with beach towels around their necks, barefoot, singing, “I Could Have Danced All Night.” A woman had some kind of flower in her hair. She’d been the lead in last night’s Chekhov mash-up.
As the conference wore on and gathered intensity, attendees who’d been waiting and planning for weeks or even months now burst into creative expression. The frenzy didn’t usually start until Sunday night or Monday, but here it was late Saturday afternoon and the terminal cases were hard at work. The barefoot singers harmonized. They turned left at the bottom of the hill, and it was quiet again.
Robin was alone and sleep-deprived and doing the best she could. I forgave her. My children would eventually heal and grow older, have children of their own. Their suffering was distant and unreal to me. Amy was also suffering, tolerating abuse in her marriage. Some kind of emotional blindness kept her strong, helped her negate the severity of these attacks. Around me, though, she felt safe, could feel her feelings, her fear and guilt. I wanted to run back to her dorm room to see if she was okay.
For eight months I’d maintained slavish contact, assembled a long-distance romance for the ages, returned here with low expectations, then saw her through a bone fracture and near-death country-doctoring to complete the most arduous seduction in history. But what she’d needed was a benign and practical kind of help, not another stalker from the meat department. I’d gained a new understanding of the workings of her marriage, one that concerned me. Given her history, her husband’s brutality was not surprising. Victims of certain crimes were more likely to be victimized again, were less able to enforce boundaries, disrupt patterns, read signs. I didn’t blame the victim, but I saw her as a locus of sexual aggression, a weird convergence of uncontrollable forces.
Sex deprivation had made me desperate, half-blind, and irrationally prone to fantasy, impulse, isolation, and cruelty. The parenting and homeownership, the borrowing, the debt, the load-bearing walls, packed inside that steady, anxious flow of days, nurturing, soldiering, corralling, building a monument to a lifestyle, to be preserved, resold, passed down, passed on. I lived in a sticky web of communal adaptations, minimizations, moderations. It made me cuckoo.
She prayed the rosary and sent money to Rome. I hated that smug superficial authority. I couldn’t stand it, how sure she was. Never reckless. Tried to leave. What better time to be reckless than now? She had all the wrong instincts, took her cues from all the wrong people, from a clergy of predators and an old Nazi pope in a crown. Nothing weird about that, nothing wrong with liberation theology in a banking context in a late-capitalist nightmare in the midst of an environmental meltdown. Arcane legislation written in secret by industry cronies on obscure financial practices and windfalls for carried interest had made her rich. She’d been formed by her parents’ immigrant struggle, a smoldering blue-collar rage, and the last two bull markets. Socially progressive, fiscally conservative, except the second part canceled out the first. She backed the NRDC, PETA, NOW, and Planned Parenthood, but also believed in trickle-down and thought lazy people who sat in drum circles on private property complaining about corporate greed weren’t helping.
Amy had a sense that she’d willed herself up from nothing, the inevitable result of grit, market trends, and globalization. She wanted that for everyone—some version of the American dream. She’d sold bonds—for some companies I’d heard of, multinationals, big pharma, a marauding Russian lumber operation hacking down the rain forest, a Chinese oil corporation building private armies in the Niger delta. Then she moved to private equity, to leverage solvent companies into ruin, strip the assets of the businesses she’d targeted, rationalize their labor forces, and shove them off a cliff. It had all worked out beautifully. Sometimes she mentioned stuff in passing, a lavish thing at Lincoln Center or a birthday celebration for Mike’s pal, with Coldplay helicoptering in for a fifty-minute set at fifty grand a song plus gas for the copter. The pal was some chemical manufacturer who I could google and hate, whose pet issues were ending corporate taxes and private space exploration. Then I’d stop speaking to her for a few hours, to let her feel my wrath.
She didn’t care what I thought, never saw herself as a leech, said she’d only worked in finance as a means to an end, told me about everything she had to put up with, the locker room atmosphere on a trading floor of mostly men who talked as though she weren’t there about who they’d like to screw, bosses who summoned her to dinner at strange hours and pinned her against the wall and slobbered on her face, younger guys who worked under her and stopped by her desk to complain about their sweaty balls, commenting on her blouse, height, legs, while she did her darnedest to get along, laugh it off. Got married so they’d stop harassing her at work. Got pregnant so he’d stop harassing her at home.
She thought of herself as a mom now, pious and demure, lonely as a nun, shooing away her staff so she could interact with her children, drive them to school, stopping by the gym for an hour to see Leon, her hot heterosexual trainer, then conference calls and meetings—sending new equipment to a hospital in Senegal, a check to a women’s shelter in Croatia—parent-teacher conferences, bedtime stories, nightly parties. She had a former athlete’s can-do spirit, a hankering for immediate and tangible results.
There were twenty-four nieces and nephews and more on the way, and tons more over in Ireland. She paid their dental and hospital bills, and had already sent half of them to college. Picked up the tab for her sister’s two knee jobs, owned four or five houses of her siblings and cousins, acting as the bank, had the best rate, zero interest, and forgave them any p
ayments they missed. The list of people benefitting from her went on and on.
I couldn’t toss Robin for some libertarian wing nut. My wife, whose negligence had nearly wiped out the next generation, whose panty shields always ended up stuck inside the dryer, who’d stayed by my side not three days earlier as we’d listened together when, for whatever reason, the dishwasher made a noise like a goat eating a tin can. Then it suddenly resumed normal operations. At that very moment we’d been sitting at the kitchen table, waiting to register Kaya for fall pre-K at the Unitarian church, staring intently at the screen like we were about to drone somebody’s ass in Kabul. A box started blinking, and at the appointed hour, online registration began. Robin clicked the button once and shrieked in agony. With many more applicants than spots, we were given a number in the low three digits. There were tense moments until we got Kaya’s slot. After registration was done, we calmly strode around the downstairs of our domicile, secure in our place in the world, her $3,000 preschool being the cheapest around by two grand, most of that money having been painstakingly set aside in our checking account—until I’d blown it earlier today, and then accidentally gave away the bracelet I couldn’t afford to someone who already had all the junk in the world.
I didn’t think these things in exactly this formulation, although I should have, but I was too wobbly, hot and smeary from too much kissing, a muscular ache in my head from using my tongue in too many directions, my crotch all sticky and stuck to my clothes. What I’d done was horrible and disgusting. Heaven would take note.
I went to the Barn and showered, and tried to forget the whole thing. I shaved in the mirror, my head wedged against the ceiling, then spent an hour on my painting of Chinese factory workers. The OxyContin left me calm and contemplative and barely able to draw. After retrieving my clothes from the dresser, I crawled backward on my hands and knees, standing slowly, dodging low-hanging beams. I figured I’d seen the last of Amy O’Donnell, that in the morning she’d head back to her dream house, close the gate, and live out her days as a stooge for a right-wing nutcase.
At seven I went back to the flagpole and tried the house. Then I tried Robin’s cell. After a dozen attempts I gave up and left a desperate message, begging her to call. I was stunned by the most excruciatingly beautiful sunset, towering, visionary, in pink-and-orange sherbet, and commiserated with other conference-goers over the inconsistency of the signal, rumors of cellular hot spots, outdated local equipment, and different networks not functioning properly because of incoming weather.
The streetlights had come on. The town looked soft in purple shadows. I rode my bike past the bay at high tide, bonfires along the beach. Bright paintings hung on the walls of a gallery, the noise from a crowd wafting out the door, the balcony above it crammed with guys. I smelled ketchup in the air, burgers on a grill, spilled beer, mussels in garlic, the clean, funky seaweed of the bay. Showered, tanned people smoked along the railing of an outdoor bar. I sensed the collective rhythm and mayhem, the double macchiatos, broken diets, and reckless spending, Mastercard bills one swipe away from disaster, romantic failures and STDs that would trail them for months or years.
The road split at the end of town. I rolled down a quiet street and looked back across the harbor at the old church steeple against a faded blue with flame-tipped clouds, strawberry streaks in Creamsicle light. The air itself was purple.
Over a little bridge, the land narrowed to a reef of dunes and scrub. On the right, the bay was shallow and weedy and flowed out to the sea. On the ocean side, high up on the dunes, were fancy houses with panoramic views. Every year I passed by here and wondered why I didn’t make $4 billion flipping media companies.
A vast modern thing, mostly glass, lit up at night like a shopping mall. A Nantucket-style house on steroids, under construction and still growing. A red brick house with tall columns that made it look like a plantation. Were they that much smarter than me? Was their flesh worth that much more? Actually, yes. A slutty-looking Spanish deal with squirting mermaid sculptures, a sprawling colonial with twelve chimneys, a hulking gray stone thing that looked like it could’ve withstood a bombardment…
Behind them, the sun kept falling through a glorious heaven.
The effect of the narcotics had faded into softly lifting waves, as thoughts flitted painlessly by. I had been held by a one-armed bandit who’d stolen my heart. By a lovely Christian housewife, a stranger really, reeking of midlife boredom and an overpowering daily sorrow mediated only by superstition, lower urges, parental terror, and religious mania. In some other world it could’ve worked.
I wondered if Beanie was asleep and whether Kaya had eaten dinner. If I’d been there, my daughter would now be glued to my lap, tired and sweaty, and I’d carry her around like a sack of flour while I brushed my teeth. Other than her traumatic premature birth, this was maybe the worst thing that had ever happened to her. I pictured her noodle arms and silken shoulder blades, which fluttered under my hands, and imagined the torn-up skin that covered them now. The cut on her hip was the worst of it. A hellish night of reactive co-sleeping lay ahead. If I’d brought them with me, none of this would’ve happened. We worry our heads off. The dread is universal. Let nothing happen to my kid. Let her be the one to not suffer. It starts off so simply, and you assume you’ll be spared.
I came upon a family of deer, silently cropping manicured grass along the edge of the road in front of a fieldstone manor, a mother and two white-speckled fawns, until a silver Range Rover barreled toward us; as they shot into the scrub, the car almost blew me off the road. Between the nutso mansions were some regular houses from a bygone era when middle-class people could still buy land on this beach. Far ahead, where the road dead-ended, surrounded by water on three sides, was a national park where anybody could rent space for trailers or put up tents, and on the other side of the road, the town’s tiny airport, a paved runway that cut through the dunes. I rode by places hidden behind a massive hedge or a gate with a glowing security panel, and turned at a big white one that looked like the Getty Museum.
Three valets stood at the end of the driveway with flashlights. I walked my bike because the gravel was too deep to ride on. Sea grasses blew delicately in the breeze. People dressed in white headed back down the driveway, already leaving. I wore a clean plaid shirt and the canvas shorts I’d had on since this morning. I was hoping to make it to Wednesday without doing laundry.
I heard clattering dishes and music and the low rumble of a crowd, and wound through a maze of parked cars, and heard the roar of the ocean a few dunes away. I’d been to this party three years in a row, and last year, at the end of the conference, there was a smaller party for just a few faculty and the director and his wife, up in the pool house, real swanky, and I got invited. A couple of us stayed late and borrowed swimsuits from our hosts, and after they went to bed we made margaritas, and accidentally broke this glass pitcher shaped like a pineapple, and flung ourselves naked from the hot tub into the pool, and someone barfed on the delicate meandering sidewalk that wound through the dunes. I ended up sleeping in one of the maids’ empty rooms, and in the morning got blasted in the face by the unobstructed sunrise, and walked out into the day to discover bagels and hot coffee, and cigarette butts floating in the pool.
In the garage at the top of the driveway a caterer had set up his operation, with steel prep tables and waiters in white coats. I said hello to some of the staff I’d met last year or the year before, standing by a golf cart: a young guy with Elvis sideburns and tattooed arms; a big black guy named Clyde, with a walkie-talkie, who’d given me a lift back into town last summer after I’d spent the night; and an old lady named Peggy, with reading glasses hanging down on her bazooms and a worried look on her face, who somehow remembered my name.
“The ice machine broke,” she said.
Clyde said, “You bring any ice?” I said no, but he laughed and said, “Oh, we got another machine at the pool.” Then he and the lady hopped into the golf cart and sped across
the driveway, into a brightly lit hole in the dunes, a tunnel so wide you could drive through it, into a garage full of gardening tools, golf carts, inflatable pool toys, umbrellas, and kayaks. Above that were guest cottages, offices, and a disco. It was their weekend place.
Marty Azamanian had made his money in parking garages but then started buying movie theaters in the eighties, then got into cable TV and radio stations, rolling them up, thanks to deregulation—until he crushed the regional networks and locked down half of North America. And was credited with helping polarize news, and finally succeeded in killing FM radio—he perfected the formula, whittling down the playlist of every Top 40 station to the same five pop tunes, cutting what was left of local coverage, turning a handful of right-wing talk-radio assholes into national icons. Then he went west to conglomerate Hollywood with a pure business plan designed to hedge against failures and helped birth hideous blockbuster sequels like Karate Kid III and the RoboCop franchise.
Over the years I’d met his tennis buddies and monied pals, who liked to pretend the house was no big deal. Marty’s ex-wife was an actress, and there were two kids from his first marriage. He also had a younger boy and girl with Bruce, his partner, through a surrogate, after he came out of the closet. Books had been written about him. He was small and ruthless and had grown up in a housing project in the Bronx, exactly where my dad grew up, on Fordham Road. I figured that out the first time we met.
Then he got into the music business, bought a football team and a two-million-acre game park in Africa, synergizing with his media monolith, diluting the brand, triggering a shareholder revolt, sucking out a billion dollars in dividends before bankrupting or flipping whatever was left. A lawyer of Marty’s was found in a parking garage with a shotgun between his knees and his teeth blown out the back of his head, and there were years spent fighting the FBI and the SEC, and he was also sometimes mentioned by name as the reason you can’t find any rhinos alive in Zimbabwe.
