Who Is Rich?

by Matthew Klam

  Anyway, it was Marty’s partner, Bruce, who really cared about the arts, a patron of the arts who, along with the wife of the local congressman, had thought up the conference fifteen years ago. Bruce was a short, thin, painfully shy man, a lawyer and aspiring memoirist who, thanks to Carl, was given a slot every year to read from his work in progress. I attended those readings whenever possible. His descriptions of fruit and nature and sailing the Aegean were dry and stiff—they put me in a coma—but the stories of his childhood in Kentucky, the scenes of his grandma’s edema and the guy who beat his mother with a fan belt, the child abuse, alcoholism, and violence of the rest of his wacky family really grabbed me.

  At the edge of the gravel I waited in line at a card table. A kid checked me off on his clipboard and handed me a name tag. Behind the table, neatly shorn, in a slim gray suit, Bruce greeted each guest by name. Propped on a chair next to the kid was a metal-framed poster that I recognized, because the drawing on it was mine, of a girl under an umbrella, typing on her laptop on the sand; I’d donated it some years ago, said they could use it, then just forgot. The poster advertised a fundraiser for the conference—this fundraiser—the girl bent over the keyboard, adorably lost in thought, water bottle, beach umbrella, bag of chips, different shady-looking men’s faces rising in thought bubbles from her screen.

  I thought the drawing was not so bad after all. The line work was cold and clean. The skin on the girl’s face was immaculate, but beneath a superficial beauty bubbled a percolation of lust. It seemed now not so much that somebody in the office had run out of ideas and found my doodle that had been lying in a drawer for three years and stuck it on a poster but that I still had talent, it wasn’t over yet for me, things would turn around. If I put my mind to it, I could do anything. I could write my way out of this mess. I’ll wake up every day at four A.M., I told myself, and do the new comic while I’m fresh and full of energy, do my magazine assignments at night, although God knows I’d tried that before and it never worked. I was too tired. Anyway, somehow I’d pull it off. The new piece would demonstrate a maturity and depth and reservoirs of fury. I’d make something so heinous and explosive that my wife would cut my nuts off, my children would pretend I was dead, society would shun me, and I’d move to Croatia and live in a kind of fantastic isolation, burning with remorse and indignation.

  When it was my turn, I stepped forward and bent at the waist to receive Bruce’s hug. He thanked me for coming, so sincerely, “and for this,” the poster, practically weeping with gratitude, and remembered my kids, with a smile that was his usual sad, suffering face, a mix of real pain and boredom. I asked about his kids, the younger boy and girl, who sometimes played in the pool during the party, and the two older ones from Marty’s first marriage, the teenage daughter who sometimes passed through the crowd, fresh from some orgy on Nantucket, looking drunk and windburned, sometimes arguing loudly with Bruce over lost privileges or demanding the whereabouts of her father. And the son, who transferred to a new college every year, and wrecked his car last winter and spent a month in a body cast.

  Seeing Bruce again, knowing him as I did, as the sane one, hearing the gossip about his struggle to protect the kids from Marty and the mother, gave me a sense of unstoppable organic parental hell. Over the winter I’d heard from Carl that the older son was doing better, taking a break from school. When I asked Bruce how he was—the kid’s name was Max—he smiled so that a tooth hooked on his lower lip, and hung his head and thanked me, and I thought that now he really would cry. He said Max was spending the summer at the house but had gone out to meet friends. Bruce was nice. That made it worse.

  Despite their billions, he was a small, stooped, fragile-looking person, and for that reason easier to relate to, and according to his memoir had been molested as a child by the old lady who lived upstairs, although when his mom died he moved back home to protect his younger siblings. See? He was a good person. He was the one looking out for those kids, and tried his best, although he was failing miserably, publicly, the outcome somehow inevitable. He went to all the plays and slide talks and openings over at the conference, and was genuinely admiring of everyone on the faculty, envious of any artistic gift, and supposedly bankrolled most of our salaries, and greased the more famous people to come teach. I got twenty-five hundred bucks a year plus travel expenses. I needed a raise.

  On the dimly lit path to the pool I passed a waiter and took a drink from his tray. It tasted like cough drops and lighter fluid. When you came here you had to be careful not to guzzle. You had to fight the urge. You felt drawn to the scene, to the need to blend in, to become what it asked of you. The patio was lit with flickering hurricane lamps, and I stood in front of the bar overlooking the pool, next to Dennis Fleigel, beside a table of cheeses and prosciutto, and a real wooden rowboat filled with ice, with oysters spread on the ice, and a man behind the boat, in a yellow fisherman’s bib, shucking the oysters with a knife.

  I recalled the events of the past few hours. Making love to Amy had cost me three thousand bucks, fifty dollars a minute. I could say I’d lost my wallet, call my bank and dispute the charge, which would temporarily restore our balance but leave me open to credit card fraud. Although the clerk had never asked for my ID, which meant that if the bank decided to investigate, I might win. It was safer to lie to Robin. On Tuesday, Carl would pay me. On the twenty-eighth, my salary would come through from the magazine.

  In the pool house they had stacks of clean towels and a popcorn machine like at a movie theater. Dennis pointed out upgrades they’d made since last summer, the patio wider and longer on this side, stone benches with padded seats around a new stainless-steel outdoor kitchen, some guy in a chef’s hat stepping around it like a busy idiot. Warren Schultz, who ran the local theater troupe, banged out show tunes on a piano. Above him, moths bumped into the glass globe of a kerosene lantern. People joined in, but Warren’s voice was louder. Below the patio were gardens, a tennis court, and then the ocean. The breeze passed through me like a spirit. When the waiter passed by, I took another drink.

  The house sat out on its own promontory, a little farther out than the houses downwind of us, which were huge and lit up like the Titanic, but not as nice. The sight of these digs always made my jaw fall open, although really I was fine until I walked up the driveway and started feeling bad about my own house, a small red bungalow with no shutters that our real estate agent had described as “charmless.” A ball of shame got lodged in my throat anytime I came here, I had trouble swallowing and kept picking at the thought, like if somebody gave me a bomb right now I’d drop it on that shitbox with my family inside: that kind of shame. This display of overkill sparked a rage of envy and extra shame for my awe, which I couldn’t control and was maybe why when I came here I drank like I did, or maybe because it was so beautiful—I drank to kill off whatever neurons grew from that brain activity, but I could feel it in the energy of people around us, the size and power of the place strengthening us as we grew to fill the scale of it, the rush of that mistaken idea, excitement and futility battling it out, making me dizzy.

  “It’s a nice breeze.”

  “Every time you inhale,” Dennis said, “you owe Azamanian sixty bucks.” He had what appeared to be a terrible sunburn.

  “And what is this one again?” I asked.

  “Negroni, sir.”

  “And what’s this?”

  “Boulevardier,” the bartender answered.

  “What’s the difference?” I heard my own loud voice barking in my ear. The bartender poured me one of each. Tabitha clinked my two glasses with hers and said it was making her cross-eyed. Dennis turned to her, horrified and amazed. “You sold a TV show?” He had a redhead’s freakish freckled sunburn.

  “Yeah, we got a pickup, or whatever it’s called.” The show would be based on some parts of her first book, about her crazy mother and her impoverished childhood in a Reno trailer park, and her second book, about the incest and her wild teens and twenties.


  “I’ve got two hundred and fifty pages done on my book,” Dennis said, “and two hundred pages to go and two more years. I’m on track.” If he kept talking, he could keep his insecurities at bay, so he started lecturing us on his current subject, Coco Chanel, and the failings of lesser biographies, which his book would hopefully trounce.

  Heather Hinman joined us. She taught in the English Department at a big university, and liked to complain that her former life as a bartender had paid twice as much and the drinks were free. She’d gone swimming in the bay and said it was beautiful, but warned us about sharp stuff you could cut your foot on where they anchored the boats.

  Ilana Zimmer had gone in the ocean and said it was rough. “Lifeguards were running out in pairs—one had the buoy around his neck and the other had the bucket of rope.” As if to back up her story, her hair was still wet. Frederick Stugatz stood there, dry as a bone, staring at the side of Ilana’s head. Her voice was deep and smoky and reminded me of her one hit song from twenty-five years ago. I heard it on the radio about once a year, and every time, I imagined her cashing a royalty check for fifty-eight cents. She and Frederick made an effort to circulate so people wouldn’t think they were having an affair, but then she told us how her son had flunked tenth-grade biology, so he’d enrolled in summer school, but when she’d called home earlier tonight she’d heard the Xbox in the background, her husband didn’t care, and Frederick looked at her like he was about to have a stroke.

  “That’s what happens,” he said, “when you drop everything to move to Bologna for six weeks.” Ilana stiffened and stared ahead.

  All the jealousy and heartache and secret negotiations, all for a hidden spooge in the dark. I’d done it, I’d popped a stranger, it was time to get to work, to use my debasing experiences for the purposes of artistic advancement, in a half-true story imbued with the mysterious behavior of actual humans, their bad decisions and perverse yearnings that somehow delight us. I’d remember this night, bathed in kerosene lamplight, in the silky air.

  And I’d return again to the vision of Amy, lying with her back to me, spooning, then moving my arm so her head rested on my chest, then facing her, our lips pressing, in what would become our best and favorite way, with her pale eyes that drew me in but told me nothing, her sorrow shifting gradually to something soulful, as she set aside those baffling values for this yielding, as I pushed until the softness resisted, as she craned her head up, eyes closed. I missed her. We hadn’t said goodbye.

  I ate salted barbecued shrimp, peeling their jackets, and rinsed my hands in the swimming pool. The narcotics had been vaguely therapeutic, but now I was totally bombed. My confidence raged. I would immerse myself in comics, get interested in cross-hatching again, bang out half a page a day, and sell foreign rights in twenty-nine countries. I’d make millions.

  I met a real estate agent named Happy Longworthy, who told me what the taxes were on a beachfront estate on sixteen acres. She introduced me to a little toad who owned the largest private collection of Greco-Roman statuary on earth, which he kept inside his house in eastern Tennessee. He invited me to come see it. Roberta explained that while finishing her film on corrupt black mayors of major American cities, she’d started her new project—a documentary about teenage hooker gangs of inner-city Philadelphia. The toad from Tennessee looked enthralled. Happy clutched her necklace. I tried to consider myself above all that, groveling before our donors, with their threat of mind-blowing patronage, them having a lot of it, me not having any. I tried not to care while slobbering all over everything. Waiters kept pushing through with trays. In the dim light, it was hard to see what they were passing around.

  “I don’t know what I’m eating.”

  “It’s sashimi,” Heather said. Unless you forcibly stopped them, the waiters handed you another drink. Some idiot fell or jumped into the pool in his clothes. It was time for dinner.

  In the bathroom I had to hold on to a wooden post to keep from falling down. The pool house had been built to resemble a rustic Malaysian jungle hut, made from exotic hardwoods, with an overgrown sod roof you could supposedly eat. I washed my hands in front of the bathroom mirror and noticed a drunk, middle-aged fraud whose moment of notoriety and one published book had faded years ago. Anyway, who was I kidding? I couldn’t use any of this stuff. Screwing a married lady, ridiculing her, dumping all over my wife and kids? I’d cause irreparable pain and harm. The fiction would collapse under the weight of the facts. And when was I supposed to get it done? Between diapers, boo-boos, and screaming fights? And scraping melted cheese off the wall? And waking up in the night when I felt like dying? As it was, I barely made it through my days. Back when I’d had no one to worry about and only bare-bones freelance gigs, a thirty-two-page comic had taken six months, eighteen hours a day, working like a galley slave. The last issue, seven years ago, had nearly killed me. I’d be in a nursing home by the time this thing was done. Someone sat in the stall behind me, grunting loudly on the toilet like my father.

  The sinks were giant wooden tree knots carved into beautiful bowls. There were stacks of crisp white hand towels. I tucked in my shirt and found, in the pocket of my shorts, a Mercedes-Benz key, which I’d grabbed to stop Amy from driving home earlier and had forgotten to give back, and started cursing. Although if I had the key, she couldn’t exactly leave. Marty Azamanian flushed and came out of the stall behind me and went to the other sink. He wore a straw cowboy hat and jeans and a Hawaiian shirt.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he asked.

  From the other pocket of my shorts I pulled out two small, sharp, pointy objects, which I held up close and examined. A pair of diamond studs, Amy’s earrings.

  “Shit. Fuck.”

  “You got a problem?”

  “Me?” I might’ve stolen them on purpose. “No.”

  He placed his cowboy hat on the counter between us. “Doing okay?” He checked himself out in the mirror.

  “Yeah, thanks for having me. Doing well. Keeping busy.”

  “Well, I’m sixty-five years old and I look like hell and I’m growing a pair of titties.”

  I couldn’t do it, couldn’t shoot the shit with a billionaire. And anyway, he was impossible to talk to, and it felt like punishment to have to thank him for something I didn’t want and hadn’t asked for and couldn’t repay.

  He touched the bags under his eyes. “I’m starting to look like my ma.”

  On that stretch of Fordham Road, black and Italian and Chinese gangs roamed, and if you wandered onto the wrong block you’d better be ready to run for your life. The first time we met I took a wild guess, then told him my dad had lived across from the big playground. Maybe that was why he liked talking to me, and why I never fell for his ghetto dialect and streetwise baloney. I couldn’t stand it, the horrible everythingness of his wealth, the crushing blackness and blindness of it, sucking me in, the museum-quality house and cowering domestic partner and fucked-up kids, the thinness of his party costume as one more way to combat the nothingness. I thanked him again, and hoped I wouldn’t see him for the rest of the night.

  My father also got himself out of the Bronx, and worked to make a better life for his kids, killing himself to get where he was going, blaming us, my mother, brother, and me, not ashamed, as if the whole human race walked around that way. He’d commuted to the city, and every other week to the insurance company’s home office in Hartford, and on the weekends he’d used sports and yard work to numb himself, and in that state was often warm and loving, sometimes silly, comic, athletic, and enthusiastic. A health nut, highly intuitive, hypersensitive, and emotionally unresolved. Unconscious, sarcastic, demanding, at times physically intimidating, threatening, destructive, and terrifying, and unable to communicate on an intimate level. He worried he’d end up broke again and back in his miserable childhood. He saw himself as a sellout and eventually decided, when he couldn’t stand it anymore, to retire at sixty-two, then ran out of money.

  It would be an exaggeration to s
ay they were broke. Their house was paid for. They were fine as long as they didn’t buy anything else. They had groceries. They had vitamins. They couldn’t afford new clothes or dinner in a restaurant. They didn’t buy gifts for each other or anyone else. Their bills were sometimes a problem. A fender-bender deductible last year had sent shock waves through their balance sheet. No vacations, no trips. If you needed him, my father could be found talking to himself in his asparagus patch, in his filthy gardening clothes and a hernia belt, or on the lookout for expenses they could trim. He was in some ways better suited to it because he’d been poor as a kid, although in other ways it was worse for him because his modest success had been his identity. He claimed he wasn’t angry, just sick of it all—not depressed, but in his retirement he didn’t need human contact, except for my mom, and had become very deep, into nature, and spent fantastic amounts of energy building his woodpile, sweating over it, sawing and chopping and crying into it because half their savings had vanished in the financial crisis and he worried about paying their heating bills. Since the meltdown, he kept their savings in cash and municipal bonds, missing the stock market rebound, and every time he opened his bank statement he thought about killing someone.

  People were already taking their seats. On the lower patio there were three long, narrow tables, maybe thirty places at each, and torches at intervals on bamboo poles. Seating not assigned, food on the table, large white steaming ceramic tureens every few seats with boiled lobsters, and small dishes between us of corn pudding and balsamic-vinegar-drenched diced tomatoes. Hunks of Brie, cakes of veiny blue cheese, crusty bread, and purple orchid petals strewn around. I started eating everything but the flowers.