Who Is Rich?

by Matthew Klam

  “No.”

  “Because you could return it.” She flicked her wrist around so the pearls moved. “It’s the nicest thing anyone ever gave me.”

  “Keep it.”

  “You know I’d do anything for you.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re not an environmental cause or a school with two thousand kids. You’re just some dude with nice lips.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I wanted to help you but I never figured out how.”

  This was merely one unfortunate thing among many, most of which did work out, on a miraculous scale, all over the world, and in return she received sincere gratitude, plaques and speeches in carpeted ballrooms over white linen with heavy hors d’oeuvres.

  “Can you understand that?” I said yes. She could’ve fixed my life. She’d fix her dog’s knees instead. I couldn’t bring myself to ask. Borrowing money from the billionaire you’ve been screwing is tacky, and looks like blackmail, and turns you into a bimbo. A breeze caught the papers on the kitchen table. They fluttered.

  “So your plan is for us to go our separate ways,” I said, “and when things get desperate we toss it in an email?”

  “That was the plan, yeah. Is there a problem with it?” She lay back on the blanket and looked up through the skylight.

  “Well, there’s the magnitude of the lie, the risk of getting caught, and the way it ruins everything.”

  She didn’t care. She needed me to be a part of it, to shield her from him.

  “I can’t give up talking to you. I can’t go it alone. I think I was dying. You brought me back.” The curtains blew softly in and out. “I spent the whole morning chattering to you in my head.” She lay with her head back, sighing, her feet rubbing against the bedspread as she shifted her arm to a better position. “When it’s quiet, your voice is the one I hear.”

  Throughout the time I’d known her, there’d always been a sense that the fantasy could not be killed or even weakened, that each of us contained the other and could function independently.

  Downtown, the noon whistle blew. Then it was quiet. For a minute, I listened to the cicadas buzzing out in the sunshine. Her chest rose and fell as she lay there.

  “Can I ask you something?” she said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do you enjoy the sound of Robin chewing granola?”

  “Sure.”

  “How about watching her stare at herself in the mirror, sucking in her gut, bragging about her paleo diet?”

  “Granola’s not on the paleo diet,” I said.

  “I told him, but he doesn’t care.”

  She lay back in a white, rigid state of resignation, self-condemnation, postponing judgment, holding it in. “I’m so tired of being invisible.”

  There was still some crap from her purse on the floor under the table. The table was made of enameled steel. My neck hurt. There were four places worn into the enamel by a lifetime of meals, so that the metal showed through. We both believed there was a rich erotic life out there that we’d been denied, that strangers knew how to access.

  “Does your wife still lie on the floor every night with an ice pack shoved down her sweatpants, saying she tore something in her hip and her foot is broken from her Miu Mius?”

  “Yes.”

  “Saying her foot hurts or she can’t find the Advil and thinks she has rheumatoid arthritis or Lyme disease?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it leaves you lonely and missing the person right in front of you?”

  “Yes.”

  She sat up, staring at me. I went to the freezer and dumped the ice from the muffin tin into a dish towel, and brought it over to her.

  While putting on her clothes, she called the camp to let them know she was coming, then walked downstairs with her shirt on crooked.

  I thought of her, alone, in pain, in the car. I couldn’t move, couldn’t get out of bed, but it was worse than that. A soft, dull, blanketed weight. There were cracked muddy smears on my thighs, her blood on my naked parts. Out of her, something torn, a wound, our imaginary family. The sight of her disemboweled grapefruit on the counter filled me with horror. I went to the bathroom and sobbed. My circuitry had been jangled. Windowless and dank, wallpaper buckling, the hum of the fluorescent bulb, the black line of mold in the grout, deep black fuzz in the fan vent, vinyl floor tiles that had come loose and been stuck back on crooked, terrible caulking, dirty handprints on the ceiling, water stains and wood rot from leaks in the walls. My sobbing had the obscene quality of a broken, cynical victim fake-laughing, desperate for revenge. Even by my own ridiculous standards, this scene went a little overboard.

  I took some time wetting and drying my face, waiting for my personality to return, bawling like a pussy. I was so sick of losing her while also losing to her, by every conceivable measure. Her children would not fall into a junk-filled construction hole. Her marriage was endowed. Their winnings were secured offshore.

  I looked around at the warped dresser, the cloudy mirror above it, the gouge in the wall behind it, the ladder, still standing beneath the cupola. I stared hard into these objects, like a little kid waiting for a seed to grow. I threw away the grapefruit and carried the garbage to the dumpster, grabbed my bike, and rode out to the ocean.

  As I arrived, cyclists were parking along the highway, locking their bikes to the guardrail, and walking through dense scrub to the dunes. The column moved, more or less single file, leaderless, trudging. Climbing into the sun, we looked out over a Saharan moonscape, our ankles sinking into deep pouring sand. Every step was a different useless thought: I missed my chance. It just might work. I’m such a shit. I need my kids. I love my wife. Then the loop restarted. I’d crossed these dunes before, but they’d changed over the winter and I didn’t recognize the path. At the top of the rise the whole mountain fell sharply away. Beneath us, kids had flung themselves, tumbling, down the dune. I marveled at the strange geology. From this distance the ocean looked like nothing, rows of fun, frothy, rolly waves glinting beyond the sea of umbrellas. I had come to perceive the lonely existence of fatherhood and monogamy as submission and defeat, saw my own children as some kind of moral betrayal of artistic purity. How did other people do it? My neighbor Curtis watched Bobby Flay after his family went to bed. In the fall he planted bulbs and raked leaves. I needed more than yard work. And no matter what, I would never stop loving Amy. I would take her to my grave.

  At the bottom of the dune were some old preserved wooden buildings, roped off with signage, and a hand-painted taco truck. Hipsters sat on picnic benches in porkpie hats and bikinis, smoking, watching the action on the waves. Surfers and kiteboarders in half-zipped wet suits ran across the parking lot. Little kids in neon shorts flipped their skateboards and fell and assessed their injuries. As I got closer the sea appeared tipped, as if coming from above me, bearing down. The sand was hot. The beach was packed. The wind came up. I stopped and put a hand up as a visor to study it, a roiling cauldron with heaving barrels crashing at bad angles and surfers flying into the air.

  An incoming wave sounded like an airplane taking off, followed by a house collapsing. Almost no one was swimming. I had an insane headache, the worst in my life. A hundred yards down the beach, I was still looking for a spot to spread my towel. Heaps of burped-up algae lined the shore. Thick bands of slimy green stuff floated in the water.

  Two lifeguards sat high up on a lifeguard chair, in hats that looked Australian, with chin straps cinched up, binoculars raised, noses painted white, in long-sleeved shirts. They flew the yellow flag. A man below them on a towel in the shadow of the chair wore his own wide-brimmed hat and long sleeves. It was Dennis Fleigel, still pink, his face painted white. He looked like the property of a civilization of larger beings, throned above him, imprisoned for later use as a ritual sacrifice. When I got close, he exploded in anguish.

  Tom McLaughlin’s German TV crew had commandeered Dennis’s well-lit, wood-paneled classroom, so Dennis had been shoved into a
windowless closet. Carl didn’t care who he humiliated. Worse, tonight’s featured event, a reading by Dennis from the Coco Chanel bio in progress, had been shifted to a dead zone tomorrow afternoon in the basement of Stinson. “It’s not fair,” he said. “You know I’m right.” He wasn’t asking. I didn’t feel like being yelled at. He didn’t know how to get along. When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I moved on.

  A piece of what looked like a telephone pole lay among some sunbathers. A red industrial fishing buoy had washed up, like a beach ball, covered in rusty slime. Whatever had happened here last night had left crap all over the place. The destruction felt true to me, a manifestation of bad thoughts. Farther down, Frederick Stugatz seemed to be meditating, elbows on his knees, hair combed, shirtless, muscled, tanned, thin, a flat middle sucked in as though he’d been holding his breath all day. He raised his chin and examined me from behind sunglasses. And even though it was clear that he’d been waiting for someone else, he was friendly.

  We sat and watched the water. I’d never seen so many surfers so close to shore, skimming and flying across the waves. I’d never seen kiteboarding. There were aerial acrobatics and fantastic wipeouts. The lifeguards were busy. It was a strong surf with riptide conditions. Now that Amy was gone I felt saner, but I also hoped I’d see someone drown.

  We talked about last night’s party. Frederick had the latest gossip. He and I were friends to the extent that we’d shared brief, odd, intense experiences over the years, like a flight crew who’d come through bad turbulence with a full load of drunks. Marty Azamanian had poured a bottle of Pellegrino on Bonnie Raitt’s boyfriend’s head for blowing the punch line to his joke. Later he’d slapped Carl across the face for interrupting him, a light, fun smack Carl hadn’t appreciated. At one time or another, we’d seen Marty leaning out an upstairs window of the pool house with his younger son, armed with powerful water-pistol machine guns, scattering the crowd. We took it, because we liked to eat lobster at his beachfront showplace. After the party, Burt had needed fourteen stitches in his head.

  I lay back and slept with the thrum of the ocean beneath me, and woke sometime later to a family of cretins who’d spread out their blanket inches away from us. Next to them were two men under a Bolla wine umbrella. They were dark, hairy, and muscular and looked like Mafia killers who’d slap you for kissing their sister, then leave your bullet-riddled body in the town square. I felt the constant slamming of the surf through the ground. I wanted a wave to come up so it blotted out the sun and blasted our bodies to pieces that washed up miles away. Down the coast I noticed three modern white windmills, so huge in the distance they looked like something in a dream.

  A whistle blew. A lifeguard pulled hard in the surf, with a yellow rope around his shoulder, as another guard paid out rope from a garbage can.

  It was hot but too dangerous to swim, so we left our towels and walked down the beach toward the state park. Farther down, there were pitted areas of wet sand, puddles, logs, garbage, a Fritos bag, a Mylar graduation balloon, a depression full of large, smooth rocks dug into the beach. The crowd thinned. Cigar butt, cigarettes, a big dead bird laid out like an Egyptian mummy. Beyond the cordon of lifeguard protection, the beach was almost empty.

  A woman came toward us, in a wifebeater and bikini bottoms with big black sunglasses. It wasn’t Amy. A little girl walked along the water, holding a smaller boy’s hand. They were nobody I knew.

  Frederick looked ahead and said, “How’s her arm?” He lifted his chin and pushed his lips together, as though he were patiently adding small numbers, then made an expression of contempt or boredom, as though he’d been forced to sigh and explain that he knew, or everyone knew.

  “It hurts.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “She’s gone. Went home.”

  “I guess it’s no fun to be here with a broken arm.”

  “I told her to get the hell out.” He turned his head. “I’m kidding. I’m being an asshole. She wanted to go.”

  Our last one had been the longest, the deepest, the most loving, the most kissing, the saddest and most tearful. And when I came inside her I felt healed, and finally began to forgive her.

  “You’re trying to do the decent thing.”

  “Not really.”

  “Do you have plans to see her again?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe it’s not over.”

  “It’s over.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “You’ll write.” He smiled. “Can you imagine, twenty years ago, writing a letter and walking it down to the mailbox five times a day? Calling her at home at midnight and hanging up if he answers? Do you say you love her?”

  “No.”

  “It’s not over. You’ll see. Winter comes, you get sentimental. So much time goes by you figure it must be love. It gets stronger. Every second, it’s right there in the palm of your hand. A few words are all you need to start again. Who will pull the other one in after a period of silence, who will draw the other one out. Who cracks first and begs for attention, who shows greater disregard for their sanity. You have that to look forward to.”

  “No.”

  “I can’t write a three-word text to Ilana I haven’t already sent a thousand times, because nothing ever changes and I’ve already said it all. I’ve already heard her same goddamned bullshit complaints. Stick around for that. Stick around for the times when you’d rather be fucking your wife but you do it anyway, when you feel guilty for loving your wife more than the one you’re supposed to be so hot for. This is five years I can’t get back, when I should’ve been saving money, planning a family vacation, thinking of something else. I guess it’s a trap. I don’t regret it. I didn’t hurt anybody.”

  “We couldn’t even make it through a year.”

  “And when you run out of stuff to say, you send photos of yourself as a baby, or tell her things that put your humanity on display—you helped an old lady wheel her groceries out, whatever. She’ll respond to that, that works for a while. You talk about your kids and she’ll pretend to love them, too. Or someone has some big event, my father died, she had cancer. Just wait. Stuff happens. You’ll turn to each other.”

  “Ilana has cancer?”

  “She did.”

  “She talked to you about it?”

  “Every day, for months. You can’t put that on someone you live with. It’s too heavy. But how much time does it take to read an email and write back ‘I love you’? Twenty seconds? Ilana also did that for me. It’s nice when someone says it.”

  Even during years when their time at the conference went badly, compared to previous summers, they’d head home revived by some deranged new thinking. Five summers, with all the excitement leading up to it, all that time afterward to relive it and compare notes. They’d meet in other places too, but the conference was better for pure release, a block of days to rid themselves of awkwardness and flinching at phantasms, without the humiliation of skulking around a hotel lobby. This was, after all, a work trip; they taught the class together. And even while it remained impossible to touch the other in public, they went ahead and assumed we knew. We did.

  Four years ago, Ilana moved to L.A. with her husband and son. Got lost in the shuffle at her record label, fought with producers, went through years of limbo hell. Scored movies that never got released, had a mastectomy, called herself “Frankenboob.” Her son missed half of eighth grade with mysterious ailments and ended up in a private school for stupid rich kids. Frederick’s father died, he lost his teaching job, found a new one at a state school an hour away for less pay.

  There were teary messages and missed birthday phone calls, sudden ill-timed fevers of horniness, flurries of nude selfies, hot messages on Christmas Day, smelly hotel rooms in Boston and L.A., windows facing an airshaft, horrible carpets with squares cut out, exposing cement and glue underneath. And afterward, alone, feeling shifty and wrung out from a sleepless night of heedless f
ucking, he walked alone at dawn in the bracing wind of November on Columbus Avenue beside Thanksgiving Day balloons. Later, when he gave in to melancholy and combed through their early letters, those ancient correspondences, he was unrecognizable to himself, talkative, lyrical, and boisterous, full of steamy excitement and the thrill of the unknown.

  Frederick told me everything. They never wrote a musical together. Half of the songs they’d written were unfinished. None were good. They never met each other’s kids. Other things had also once seemed inevitable. This year, for the first time since the year of her lumpectomy, they hadn’t seen each other once between conferences. Neither one could muster the energy or manage the logistics. And when, two nights ago, on Friday, they’d finally gone off together to discharge their affairs, she’d fallen asleep immediately and he could see in her sleeping that their sex hadn’t changed her. It hadn’t changed him either, until he saw her lying there, then felt jealous and panicky and couldn’t sleep, and in the morning was forced to go through the motions, while her motherly mollifying made him feel like her idiot son. Saturday afternoon had been an improvement, though only from repetition. But last night, after the party, down the beach from the Azamanians, in the rain, beneath some billionaire’s heavily anchored volleyball net, they screwed once more, on the sand, and it was perfect and wiped out everything.

  “It was nice,” he said, nodding his head.

  “I bet.”

  “We’ve been lucky.”

  We had turned around where the beach narrowed at the trailer park and had circled back, and were at our towels again. At five, the lifeguards blew their whistles and packed the equipment onto their ATVs and left. The wind had died down, which seemed to calm the water. Frederick’s secrets had left me in a weird state. There were gaps between sets of roguish waves. It was a trap, another vow, another job. I ran like a maniac and dove under the rolling surf. It was cold and I stroked spastically. The waves were biggish but not demonic, and I watched them coming and tried to get a sense of an approaching surge. It was all in pieces. I got slammed and half the ocean went up my nose. Farther out was a smooth rolling sea, and I had no problem treading water.