by Matthew Klam
Dennis sat beside me, sweating from his sunburn. He really was cooked, couldn’t bend his arms without gasping, kept patting his forehead with a cocktail napkin. The napkins had been printed up for this event; on each of them was the year and the name of the conference, with a tiny reproduction of my drawing of the girl, like a logo, typing on her laptop under an umbrella. A has-been, a never-was, but my drawing had some iconic power.
Roberta sat by Dennis, and Happy and the Tennessee toad sat across from us. The toad wore a ring that might’ve been from some plundered civilization. Vicky Capodanno appeared, scraping her chair on the patio, and sat on the other side of me, spilling her drink on both of us. She raised her lighter, with the cigarette backward, staring into the wrong end. She liked to follow me around when she got drunk, with the understanding that she was helpless and alone, couldn’t take care of anyone else, too fucked up to have her own kids, although a little obsessed with mine, sending them origami swans and disturbing tween novels they wouldn’t be able to read for ten years. When I looked again, the filter was on fire and she was trying to take a drag. Still, I was subordinate to her fame and biennials and whatnot, works in major permanent collections like MoMA and the Tate.
“Hey, pal,” I said, hitting her on the shoulder. “I love you.”
“Hey, pal,” she said, and tipped her chin up and winked, sucking hard, blowing smoke. “I know who you love.”
I ignored her. People around me futzed and chattered as though they’d never seen these things before, as though these lobsters had just hopped off a spaceship from Mars. I ripped out the tail with my hands and ate it with butter running down my arms. A guy named Conrad gallantly wielded his nutcracker, shattering the claws for the women around him, telling us about a recent trip to Finland, including a special someone he’d met named Kaspar: “Poet, musician, diplomat, doctor, and I said to myself, ‘If this guy’s queer, I’ll cream my mushrooms.’ ”
Everybody laughed. I cracked a claw. It shot a stream of warm lobster juice right into my face. A waiter went around, pouring white and rosé. I got both. I took a second lobster and went at it like a badger. At the center table, Carl stood and gave the fundraising speech. I’d already heard it eighty-five times. All around me, they went through stacks of napkins, wiping their faces, sopping up puddles on the table, ruining my drawing, leaving shredded piles of what looked like oatmeal.
Reports funneled down from the other end of the table that Burt had tripped on the sandstone path. There was a head wound and blood. Edna was with him. The party kept going. Paramedics arrived from the wrong side of the pool and had to pass by us to reach him. I flagged the sommelier, who poured me a Riesling.
Vicky put her cigarette out in the middle of her lobster and yawned and winked at me. Trudy Miller warned us not to eat the green goop because of the sewage in the bay. Winston Doyoyo, an old man from South Africa who happened to be a Nobel Prize–winning playwright, emptied the contents of his mouth into a napkin. Everywhere I looked, people were doing disgusting things to my drawing. Trudy said that at her daughter’s high school prom, girls were allowed to bend over no more than ninety degrees on the dance floor while pressing their asses against the crotch of a boy’s pants. More than ninety degrees was forbidden. Tabitha said her daughter’s orthodontia cost six grand. The wind came up and flung tablecloths and silverware, coffee cups and a tray of cookies onto the ground. They discussed their kids’ soccer injuries, calculus, piano lessons, and abortions. I’d have to raise Kaya and Beanie and launch them out into the world. It hadn’t even started yet, and then they’d leave and I’d miss them forever and they’d hate me like kids do.
Whatsherface, Bonnie Raitt, got up and played a song, kissing Marty’s ass when she finished, telling us how he’d revolutionized the music industry. Marty took the microphone and told her to sit down, and made us clap for his boyfriend for founding the conference. Bruce stood and in his trembling voice thanked the faculty: “For the blessing you give our strident struggle to voice the silence clotting our throats.”
“I wish I were back in the dorm,” Tabitha said, “reading my students’ garbage.”
“Do you know how much a billion is?” Dennis said. “It’s a thousand million.” He’d gotten to the party early, so Bruce had taken him for a spin around the main house. “ ‘I designed this kitchen myself. I designed this ocean myself.’ Give me a break, you fucking phony.”
The house tour had wounded him. I knew how he felt. The place was so gorgeous you wanted to start ripping planks out of the floor with your teeth. Maybe you’d dreamed of royalty as a child, or you’d fantasized about living in a castle or flying in a private plane, but either way it triggered what you never got or gave up on long ago, something sad and personal, and it was subconsciously exhausting. The house was designed to make you feel awful.
Summer will end, fall will come, then winter, when everything dies. Back home, I’ll be doodling in my basement, recalling this lobster feast in the silken air in kerosene lamplight, and the beautiful glimpses of Amy from earlier, our endless afternoon, spliced, assembled, and preserved. I’d been fine until now, but the hours had passed. The further I drifted from her, from our moments, the harder it was to live. But unless she’d hired a tow truck, her car was still here, and so was she.
“Cartoonists must enjoy doing illustration,” Heather said, holding a now decomposing napkin that featured my work.
“Sure,” I said. “If they want to eat.” It was one of those polite, slightly forced, heartfelt exchanges we had when we were stuck together at a fancy thing. Heather said good illustration had certain intangibles. I more or less agreed. The piece I’d started that afternoon would accompany an investigation of suicides at a cellphone factory in China, with 430,000 employees crammed into a dozen giant buildings over a square mile, on three shifts, twenty-five cafeterias running twenty-four hours a day. One guy killed himself after a thirty-two-hour shift, and another one jumped off the roof after working 112 straight days. Average age of suicide: nineteen. Labor cost to build a cellphone: eighty cents. Try drawing that.
Vicky slumped in her chair, eyes narrowed, head back. I winked at her. We were communicating nonverbally about artistic integrity. Then I realized she’d passed out.
Frederick and Ilana slipped behind our table, ducking torches, passing through the crowd as though they were invisible, or we were brain-dead, taking the path out to the beach. Waiters started clearing the other end of the table. The swimming pool was lit but empty. Conrad and some Scottish guy were naked in the hot tub, trying to work the Jacuzzi buttons. A fine rain had begun. Two women from the Theater Department climbed out, bodies steaming, and flicked their hair. Towels sat stacked in the rain. When I looked back again, Frederick and Ilana were gone.
Strong winds came up, spitting rain, then sand, blowing sparks and smoke from the outdoor fireplace, which led to last call and a crowd at the bar. Roberta waved her drink, talking about a kid named Skittles, who lived in his grandmother’s crack house and had sex in a McDonald’s men’s room. Happy Longworthy rubbed her necklace. I followed the footlights off the patio, toward my bicycle.
“Let me ask you a question,” Tom McLaughlin said, stumbling. “Will you have a drink with me?” The later it got, the more he drawled like a Texan. I kept walking, so he turned to the sleepy, tulip-shaped intern, one of the interns who’d stolen water from our dugout, and asked her.
“No thanks,” she said. “I’ve had enough.”
“These are both my drinks,” he said, banging into her. “But this one’s younger, so I’m treating it more gently.”
Winston Doyoyo sometimes snuck out at night without his wife or assistant and had to be dragged off women who’d agreed to dance with him, even though he was almost eighty. Carl liked to walk through the tent at mealtimes and pull on women’s ponytails. Toward the end of the conference, he sometimes threw his tongue down somebody’s throat without asking. Ilana and Frederick used the conference as some kind of bidet
for them to wash their private parts in, before heading back to their loved ones. The staff was cleaning up.
“Hey, Clyde,” I said. Empty bottles, cigarette butts, an abandoned dress, and high-heeled shoes looked like the remnants of a Roman orgy. “How’s that ice machine?”
He grabbed the pool house doors and slid them closed. “Time to go home!”
Weaving in the dark in the rain through the west end of town, I saw the neon sign for the taffy store and passed bars blaring house music and a tea dance raging around the swimming pool of a one-story motel. A garbage bag of ice swung and bounced against my leg as I pedaled. I dodged pedestrians, the street jammed with sweaty dancers three deep in front of the pizza place. I reached campus and drank rainwater off my lips as grass came up under the tires and I fell over and lay there, gasping.
Amy’s dorm was locked. I banged on the door. I’d brought this ice for her. Someone opened a window and told me what to go do to myself. I responded with vicious threats and disgusting obscenities. This scene was playing out as yet another storied episode in an epic affair, big, with obstacles we fought through to be together. Someone came around the corner with a walkie-talkie and said he was calling the police, but it was just the kid who played ukulele at open mike. He asked if I knew where I lived.
Up the hill past the windmill I dumped the ice onto the grass. The old Barn sagged along its roofline, under the cupola and weather vane. I hefted my bike to the third-story landing, dropping it and tripping over it on my way in the door. Toilet and shower stall to the left, kitchen straight ahead, grease stains on the wall, dishes in the sink, dented pots, and a flimsy, unpainted partition wall that blocked off a place to hang clothes. It looked like the inside of the Unabomber’s shed. A metal table with my teaching notes and papers and four chairs that crouched like spiders beneath the windowed cupola, which even now shed grayish light. And in the light, some half-finished sketches of Chinese factory workers. When they couldn’t escape the system or work any harder inside it, they simply took themselves to the roof of the factory and threw themselves off.
I emptied my pockets, banging into furniture, hitting my head on the ceiling, and tried to take off my shoes without falling over. I’d given up everything for cartooning, and for that alone I deserved to die. Then I gave up on cartooning. I suffered psychic grief, low output, self-mockery, obscurity, isolation, depression, all of the deprivations of artistic sacrifice—without making any art. Marriage and parenthood provided a kind of second life, a new beginning, for some failed artists. Certain men thrived in it. If these past years had been any indication, I never would.
In the eaves of the apartment, the roof met the floor. Deep in the pinched area, behind the sofa, a wooden folding ladder had been pitched longways, tall enough to allow someone to change a lightbulb up in the peak. I squinted at the shape of it in the dark. I thought I could use it to reach the antique rafters in order to hang myself.
Did I want to hang myself because I was a lonely, drunken whore? Or because I couldn’t figure out how to make a comic about it, to find meaning in it? I didn’t know.
I went to my luggage for a belt, crying a little, sick of it all, of cowering, groveling, slaving away for pennies on scut work while dysfunctional tycoons complained about their man titties, or hoarded priceless antiquities, or told my art director what to do with me. Billionaires decided for me, told me where to go, what to think and draw, they underwrote the conference that brought me here to this hotbed of debauchery that fired my imagination and damaged my soul.
I was tired. Or it was the booze and narcotics, and the billion-dollar pay cut Amy would have to accept to be with me. I wanted to sleep. How would it feel to be gone? Had the world been missing me before I was born? Hasn’t everyone at one time or another imagined himself gone? How sad would my kids be? This body held and protected them, these arms lifted them in the night, this voice came to them even in the womb. A healthy man who played with them on the floor, he went away and never came home. The children weren’t told how he died, and his passing left an empty place, a smaller, meaner, sadder life. I wanted to believe I was worth more dead than alive, but it was about the same, which was nothing.
Robin’s brother died in a rainstorm coming back from a Police concert his senior year in high school. Five other people, including the driver, who’d fallen asleep, walked away from the wreck. He’d played the violin better than Robin did, had long, elegant hands, aced AP physics, was the editor of his high school yearbook. He was nice. He’d been admitted to an Ivy League school for the fall, and had already written back to say he was coming. When their parents had split, a year or two earlier, he’d accepted the sudden promotion to man of the house and stopped bullying his little sisters, seemingly overnight. It was a Saturday in early spring, and later that night, their family doctor went down to the morgue to identify the body. In the morning, a neighborhood boy knocked on the door, and brought them flowers, and swept their steps, and raked their yard.
And who can say what happens to a family when events occur beyond their control? If this could happen, what was to stop anything else from happening? If this could happen, why did it happen only to them? And how would it be for you, the younger sibling, next in line behind the boy with nice hands, if you didn’t have his smile or easygoing charm? For the rest of your life, whatever you accomplished, you’d have to wonder—or you didn’t wonder, but everyone else did—what if he’d lived? It would drive you insane.
We met twelve years later. She didn’t talk about it. The driver was still a friend of the family’s. He sent them cards at Christmas: “All best wishes.” What did he want? What did any of it mean? She dealt with Eddie’s death by forgetting him and putting it out of her mind.
After her dad moved out, after her brother was killed, after her trip to France with her sister and the dad’s new Turkish floozy, she came home to find a student of massage therapy in Eddie’s bedroom. Thanks to her dad’s lawyer, her mom had to take in boarders for extra cash. She went to her dad’s house on weekends, and sometimes snuck out at night, unchaperoned, fourteen years old, in a green suede miniskirt and purple cowboy boots. And while her sister went to live in a psych unit for eating disorders and their mom accompanied her there, Robin camped out at her father’s, and got arrested for shoplifting, and borrowed his keys, and totaled his Jeep. She had rock ’n’ roll predilections, and more than once she had to be picked up by bouncers and carried out and deposited on the sidewalk. She was tough, or the family traumas did it, inoculated her against fear, hesitation, whatever. She figured she’d be dead by age thirty.
In high school she loved a lot of skinny boys with curly brown hair who were roughly Eddie’s height. She did it on staircases and in tree houses and hammocks and swimming pools and on the hoods of cars. She went to a big university, then switched to an all-girls college, then dropped out. At her father’s urging, she attended some kind of archaeological summer camp, in Colorado, set among beautiful Native American ruins, and worked on a film there, or assisted some visiting TV crew, and thought this might be an interesting way to make a living.
Five years later she moved into our group house in Hampden. I was cocky and terrified and twenty-nine, working as an art director at an ad agency with forty employees and a monthly nut of a half million dollars. I ran focus groups of homeless men as they discussed their favorite fast food sandwiches. I designed billboards to trick poor people into getting on a bus to throw away their money at a casino in Atlantic City. Eric had founded the agency but now spent most days in his office screaming at Republicans on TV. In lean times he’d call in whoever it was and hand them the benefits folder, then fire them and let them out the side door. We lived under the constant threat of annihilation.
Robin and I started dating, although I hadn’t loved anyone with a straight face for any sustained period except for family dogs, and wasn’t too sure what I thought. I thought many things—I thought she was pretty nice, and that I was pretty smart. During our fir
st winter together, the symptoms of her concussion gradually faded. I was so relieved to have found someone. And yet, even an idiot could see this was mostly lust. For a long time I’d just wanted to kiss her, and thought that would be enough, and then I wanted to screw her three hundred times and be done with it.
There was nothing weird or nasty about it. It wasn’t new, although it wasn’t old, either. It worked every way we tried it; it was amazingly filthy yet absolutely clean. I thought she was powerless to see this kind of doubleness and subterfuge; I thought she was weirdly innocent or blindly trusting, and vulnerable to this kind of deceit. Maybe she didn’t have the skill to identify a swindler like me. Her trust left me feeling mortified, and somehow responsible for her, and then miserably stuck. I loved her, in defiance of the sniggering little joker I pretended to be.
Complicating the problem of our personal life was another small detail. I was having my moment. What had begun in a free local alternative paper now ran in syndication in several other college-town papers. My ego ballooned. Within a year of our getting engaged, I’d signed on to do my own freestanding comic. The writing overwhelmed me. For a single twenty-four-page issue, the artwork alone was equivalent to a year’s worth of strips. I ditched my job and drained my savings, which left me shaky and nocturnal and chained to my drawing table, which, as you can imagine, made me a real joy to live with.
By then Robin had spent almost two years writing puppet dialogue in Spanish and English and was slowly going nuts. We were still living in Baltimore, in a small beige house in Lauraville that cost almost nothing, with solid oak six-panel doors, louvered transom windows, a claw-foot tub, blah blah, overlooking a massive cemetery that had been featured in Homicide and The Wire. Seventeen minutes from the Inner Harbor, ten minutes from the interstate, with a new Giant supermarket, a car wash, a Korean barbecue, an AutoZone, and an all-black elementary school under heavy renovation. And sometimes guys standing on the corner with their pants sagging down, selling drugs into car windows and yelling, “You look at me? Keep driving, faggot!” In our own small yard, under big old shade trees, maples and oaks, there were flower beds of irises that smelled like root beer, and a long row of peonies, big white ones flecked with pink.
