by Matthew Klam
I opened the bag to see what she’d bought me and found a gray polo shirt with a duck stitched on the breast and a three-pack of Fruit of the Loom boxers, price tag still on, $16.95. Rolled up at the bottom, like an afterthought, was a yellow necktie with brown loops on it. I examined it carefully, ashamed and confused. It looked like one I’d worn to my Aunt Doris’s wedding in 1979. She’d purchased this stuff at a creaky old store on Main Street that also sold smelly candles and beach toys. I couldn’t understand. Cheap, sensible clothing for the budget-minded male. Apparently I meant nothing to her, which I already knew, but now I knew how little nothing actually meant.
She blew $26,000 on her dog’s knee surgeries, destroyed a one-of-a-kind custom-made ball gown because she couldn’t find the zipper. Though she could also be thrifty and practical. She used old bread bags to carry her lunches, reheated leftovers, tossed in a sprig of rosemary to freshen her pot roast, wore shoes that hurt if they couldn’t be returned, hunted down mysterious charges on her credit card bill and hammered the people who’d tried to overcharge her.
She’d dragged herself out of the working class with the strength of a locomotive, and looked back now with something like contempt. We’d turned into a nation of moochers, she’d told me once, and the attitude of entitlement bothered her. She worried—not that all gains went to the top, that Romney promised to overturn Roe v. Wade, but that our pride was gone, that the moochers didn’t value things, like after-school programs, that were given to them for free. No matter how poor these people were, she’d gone on, it was better to make them pay. Then she’d explain the fee structure at some center she funded.
They lived in a monstrous stone-and-shingle masterpiece and also owned a $20 million duplex overlooking Central Park, and a “crappy” place in London, and a “nice” place in Chamonix. She employed a French-speaking Moroccan chef named Yasmine. I hated her life but thought I should have it. One hundred and twenty million dollars a year was the GDP of the Marshall Islands. If I worked for two thousand years, I’d earn the same as her husband did in one. Their net worth was a concept, like infinity. Easy to say, impossible to imagine.
We were an economic and planetary system at war, victims of a political farce. There’d been moments over the winter when I’d wanted to interrupt our epistolary love affair to unleash a searing rant of impeccable erudition—on the history of unstructured capitalism, twentieth-century U.S. imperialism, American workers forced to compete with Asian slave labor, private for-profit mass incarceration, Donald Rumsfeld, the Koch brothers, Citizens United, and the coming worldwide extinction—but I never got around to it.
I went through her purse and found some used Kleenex, hair ties, gum, a tube of Pantene Overnight Miracle. Eyeglasses, a kid’s toy pen that looked like a cucumber. An Air France deck of cards. In her wallet I found $367 in bills, some dimes and quarters, a discount punch card for a pet food and supply store, credit cards, random business cards—“Win Win, matching Wall Street executives with nonprofit causes.”
I’d been waiting for summer, for her. I’d wanted someone to save me. I wanted to lick her hand like a dying animal. I felt a horrible sadness twisting my face. From the start I’d been trying to function, to win her, to compete from a position of moral, material, psychic, and sexual subordination, underemployed, underfunded, improperly adorned. Loving someone is already so debilitating. To do it from this lowly place was so much worse. I saw an ordinary middle-aged man, unable to meet his responsibilities, jobless and abandoned, hurtling toward a last phase of doom.
I started to scream. It was the scream of a man who had no sense, who panicked and threw terrifying tantrums, smashed things, and sometimes smacked his own kids. I had vowed a long time ago that I would never become him, and I didn’t, tried not to, but I’d become him anyway. Overwhelmed, destructive, destroyed.
I shoved the kitchen table out of the way with surprising ease. The old wooden ladder was heavier than it looked. I dragged it out from behind the filthy plaid sofa and hefted it vertical, vaguely noting the name of the old shipyard burned into one end and the worn wooden dowels that served as steps. I opened it up beneath the cupola’s box of bright sunlight and climbed. At the top of the ladder I took in the view in all directions, the glinting water of the blue-black harbor, sailboats running spinnakers, feeling suddenly more alive, seeing colored spots, blinking and panting. Car traffic backed up all the way to the fish market. Across the highway, undulating dunes went out to the point. The dowels hurt as my flip-flops slipped against my sweaty feet. I swallowed back fear, still a little fuzzy on what I meant to do, as a feeling unimaginably corny and sad took hold.
Who hasn’t felt this way at least once in his life? Who hasn’t thought, at least once, Enough, stop the merry-go-round and let me off? Suicide is a selfish, pathetic, disgusting act. A weak, manipulative, evil thing that leaves behind nothing but the tortured souls of loved ones, twisting in limbo. I’ve lost everything, I’m a misfit, no one understands me, I want out. What a coward—I wanted a coward’s death. I undid my belt and tossed it over the rafter, then cinched it around my throat. Dare me to do it. Dare me to jump! I leaned into the belt to test its strength, felt it tighten, heard the silence of suffocation. I couldn’t catch my breath, but even breathing seemed like one more thing to worry about. My own death felt neat and simple. It felt portable, viable, and private. I started to fade, and panicked, and stepped up to undo the belt buckle, thinking I’d maybe taken this joke too far, as a flip-flop caught on the rung. I heard a loud bang and went flying.
OBSCURE CARTOONIST FOUND DEAD BY STINGY PHILANTHROPIST
Richard I. Fischer, 42, of Takoma Park, MD, a failed artist whose small illustrations appeared from time to time in a magazine that no longer exists, died Sunday from injuries related to accidental strangulation. An autopsy confirmed that the deceased had ejaculated several times in recent days, while attending an annual conference here in the Outer Beaches area without his wife, Robin Lister, 38, also of Takoma Park. A part-time television executive generally considered to be thin, loyal, and attractive, Lister had been hoping since June to shoot or stab Fischer in the testicles or chop off his penis. His only book, a graphic novel entitled I Have Suffered Greatly, had been out of print for several years, although he’d hoped to revive his career by basing a new semiautobiographical comic upon his recent adulterous experiences. The deceased had been under considerable financial strain and heavy psychological stress and had been looking forward to his annual visit to the Outer Beaches, with its pleasing climate and abundant national seashore. In the evenings he’d enjoyed the sight of many small bonfires behind the motels on the bay, and in the mornings, during his walks among the dunes, along the maze of tall grasses where gay men often came to rendezvous, it had cheered him up to see used, brightly colored condoms, flung into tree branches, dangling in the scrub.
I felt a sharp pain and heard myself groan. I wasn’t dead, or even dying. I’d landed on my back on the kitchen table. Through a quick examination, I detected no serious injuries. Underneath my back, I found a broken pair of Amy’s eyeglasses.
What the hell. I couldn’t even manage to kill myself. The belt lay draped around my neck. The metal prong on the belt buckle had snapped off and was gone. Maybe I’d done it wrong.
Maybe I wasn’t supposed to die yet.
I had to stop this, whatever it was, this experiment—stop treating my life as fodder for a story, stop treating the story as a way to take revenge, as a secret code to friends and lovers, as a suicide note. I had to stop, but I couldn’t.
As a kid I’d climbed too high and fallen out of trees, experimented with the contents of friends’ parents’ gun cabinets, knocked out my front teeth on a dark, twisting road in the family Cherokee after figuring out, at fourteen, how to ease off the parking brake and roll down the driveway. Sexual high jinks, psilocybin, thrill seeking, abortions, back taxes, frivolously, flippantly impractical life goals. Marriage and kids had merely distracted me from the task,
the need to hurl myself like a madman, to run the experiment until I’d torched the lab and had to sift through the debris for clues. There was shame from having tried, the tantalizing suspicion that I’d tripped on purpose, and the sickening relief at having failed again to die.
Standing, bending over unsteadily, I gathered things from the floor and put them back in her purse. I picked up her phone. It didn’t ask for a password. She had Sprint, which apparently worked better on this end of campus.
What could I possibly have been looking for? I knew everything from our ten thousand emails, and in these last two days I’d learned more. She’d shipped her seven-year-old to sleepaway camp against her better judgment, four months after brain surgery, still twenty pounds underweight. Her husband forced himself upon her as she lay there grossed out, wondering whose fault it was. She’d agreed to spend eternity buried next to that fascist.
I began scrolling through her latest messages: an overdue notice from the town library, Harry Potter, fifty cents; a note from a tour operator with an outline of the Rapazzo family’s fall cruise off the tip of South America, private transfers, five-star yacht, Magellanic penguins. Lou Ann Haney from her spin class wondered where she’d been all week. Her hair appointment with Gregory was confirmed. A museum board chairwoman apologized for some unintended slight at a social gathering. I saw only bare-bones communications between her and Mike: “home Friday,” “no, can’t, in mideast till 11th.” She hadn’t exaggerated; it was like Morse code. There were polite exchanges between his secretary and wife to arrange his tee times and doctor’s appointments. A letter from the chapter head of a Franciscan monastery in Boston thanked Amy for a generous contribution, a “considerable, sustaining gift.”
I found a spreadsheet from her assistant, Danielle, listing tax-deductible donations from the last two months: a Fukushima relief fund, a hospital in Macedonia, a project to help slow real estate development along sensitive wetlands areas. The donations added up to almost $11 million. It seemed that she couldn’t be bothered to uncap her pickle pen for less than seven figures. What about me? I could ask for a loan at least, a measly three thousand bucks.
I’d already googled her a thousand times, found rumors of political front groups that received Mike’s help, organizations that wanted to put Romney in the White House, to end all regulatory agencies, dark-money cash machines and fake grassroots charities with patriotic-sounding names. I’d tracked down, then wished I hadn’t, publicly disclosed campaign contributions of Michael V. and one Amy D. Rapazzo, backing gubernatorial, House, and Senate candidates, state reps, right-wing candidates from across the country.
One mystery leads to the next, exposes a deeper question, pushes it out into the open. Who was she? How did I end up here?
I’d been given unimpeded access to her domestic perversions, her agonizing fears and deliberations as the umbilical cord went taut across too many miles. She’d shown me that good luck wasn’t necessarily good, money couldn’t replace the veins in a child’s head, that a parent’s worst nightmare might still come true. I’d sent heaps of love letters, presided over the realm of her body, an apparently invulnerable place of wet and warm, of cool and sorrow, of subdermal pulses and deep red blood. Gave her eighteen orgasms, loved and cared for her in a way no one ever had, and in return I’d been graced with her attention, a thing of value beyond the mechanism of her wealth. All I’d wanted was someone strange and new, to restore some wonder to the reason we exist. Amy had given me that.
She’d been emailing a Sotheby’s agent just this morning, about the house for sale next door to hers, “Pheasant Ridge, a significant Georgian manor on seven acres.” Meandering meadows, three-thousand-bottle wine cellar. Asking price: $28 million. She wondered about the highest bidder’s escalation clause. But why? Was she planning to outbid him? So she could move across the driveway under the cover of darkness? To split from Mike without the public humiliation? In letters to me she’d floated several scenarios, including his possible relocation to the Frankfurt office or a more permanent move to their digs in New York. She wondered whether their kids would even notice. She’d also discussed blowing out their pool house or adding another floor to their already massive pad, to get him out of her sight. She seemed to think it could be done without telling anyone, not even him.
Or maybe she wanted to buy Pheasant Ridge for me.
I sat at the kitchen table, staring at her phone, listening to her walk up the stairs. She went to the bed, moving stiffly, picked up the T-shirt she’d worn to sleep, and shook it one-handed. “They wouldn’t give me anything,” she said. “Except this.” A blue sling suspended her arm on a strap around her neck. She turned to me with slanted eyes of Irish sorrow. “I don’t remember taking all six pills.”
Her hair had a bump on the side and a jagged part. The pain went through her shoulder, she said, up the side of her head. She hunched, not smiling, distracted, looking worn, her face gaunt.
I’d loved her just this morning. I’d loved her as much as I could. I suggested that maybe her pain threshold wasn’t as high as she’d thought. She searched my face. It was a wistful, bitter acceptance.
“My doctor called in the refill, but the guy at the pharmacy said it’s illegal to prescribe that stuff over the phone. He said if he gets audited he’ll lose his license. He said a ten-milligram pill has a street value of twenty dollars.” The sarcasm seemed to relieve the pain. “That’s a thirteen-dollar net.”
She dropped the T-shirt on the bed and came toward the table, blinking wildly, her jaw opening, testing the ache. Her purse lay on its side. Some of her stuff had fallen on the floor again. She lifted one half of her eyeglasses to her face, then dropped it.
“I almost forgot,” I said. “Thanks for the shirt. You didn’t have to do that.”
She looked at me strangely. In return, a forced smile plastered itself under my nose. I tried to change it but couldn’t, so I arranged my face to say that these meager offerings were too pitiful to acknowledge beyond a few insincere words. She picked up the shirt and tie and carried them to the couch.
“This stuff is for Mike,” she said. She moved in a kind of modified creep, then came back and got the boxers. If she kept moving, she said, she could distract her body from the pain. She began folding her own clothes on the bed, breathing loudly, carefully packing them into her bag, with a throbbing energy that barely hid a suppressed spiritual agony. She held it in, cold and resigned.
She stuffed her sandals down into her bag one-handed, and threw the bag on the kitchen chair. Then she hurled herself onto the bed, rubbing her feet against the old cotton bedspread in a writhing motion as if to soothe herself.
“You missed your meeting in New York.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Send them a check.” She ignored me, wincing, adjusting her arm. “How much did you give the people you were on the phone with yesterday?”
“None of your beeswax.”
“Your assistant needs to enter it into the spreadsheet.”
She turned back, a little astonished, squinting at me, then noticed her playing cards on the floor and her phone in my hand.
“Was there anything else you wanted to know?”
“Why are you bidding on Pheasant Ridge?”
“I’m not.” She looked away sourly. “Quit looking at my fucking phone.”
“But why were you talking to the agent?”
She fell back on the pillow. Her expression gave way to something dark and remote. “Because I was sad.”
“Sad?”
“I thought I could donate it to St. Anne’s, my church, as a home for adolescent mothers and their babies.”
“And that would make you happy?”
“Yes. Or a lab to study the effects of overdevelopment on the local water table. But a real lab, part of the university.”
“I don’t think it’s zoned for that.”
“I’m not sure.”
“Why are you giving money to those goatfuckers
?”
“What?”
“Are you a Republican?”
She let her head fall back. “No.” She closed her eyes. “I’m nothing.”
“How are you nothing?”
“Although I do believe that in some situations, private enterprise can succeed where big government fails—”
I grabbed my head and yelled. She stopped talking. We waited. Then she asked quietly, “You’re talking about my campaign donations?”
“Yes.”
“That’s Mike’s list.”
“You’re full of shit.”
“He wants a united front,” she said. “Because it looks better that way.”
“You do this stuff and then you blame him.”
“No.” Her eyes were closed. “It’s not mine.” She winced in pain and shifted her arm. “Nothing is mine. Not my kids or my work or my own body, or even my own name. If he wants it, it gets taken. If he does something disgusting, I have to live with it. If I do something good, something I support that he likes, education reform or my projects in the Baltic states, he takes it, he makes a call or writes a check and somehow my name gets cut from the press release and no one can tell me how that happened.” She looked at me. “The only person I want to help I can’t,” she said. “You don’t need my help, do you?”
I could’ve told her about our debts and loans, back taxes and whatnot, my endangered job at the magazine. I said no. She smiled. I think she knew. “Do you want the bracelet back?”
