Who Is Rich?

by Matthew Klam

  Looking back at the shore I saw her at our towels, perched on one knee but not sitting. Ilana had come to the beach after all. Good for them. He looked up but not directly at her. Soon the sun would begin its shameless, cornball, rhapsodic routine, a perfectly engineered, lurid light show of color, softening slightly at this hour before it turned a golden pinkish yellow, fading the world. Sandpipers dipped their wings and flew past. Fred had been trying to warn me, as a brother, as a friend. Or maybe he’d just been relieving himself of the burden so he could get back to business. Or maybe he wanted me to know how lucky he’d been; how he’d found this arrangement that demanded nothing; that he’d been careful not to blow up his marriage; that Ilana had become an old friend, a comrade, who he joined once a year for these magically efficient sexual interludes.

  If she hadn’t played, hadn’t slipped, if I hadn’t rushed it, or wasted half of her pills. If they’d given her drugs this morning she’d still be here, with her arm in an umbrella bag, treading my same water. What a pig I was. What a disaster. We owned that dumb little bed but never got out of it, never saw the ocean, never got the chance to have our own fun. She was different from Robin; that was all that mattered. Her height, her shoulders, her smell meant freedom. Fred slid over, and Ilana sat beside him. Look at them. Please sit. Stay. I would take her back, broken, miserable, and blind to my needs.

  Who would cave first? Who would show the least restraint for their sanity, who would crack? Would we keep this up for years as some soul-sucking, double-secret support group?

  A wave bore down and pulled me into a trough and I curled up and waited until it passed. I was fifty or a hundred feet from shore. Then another, and another. I got spun inside a washing machine, legs flung supernaturally back and behind, my body bent in half like a doll, eyes peeled open in airless panic. I shot to the surface and caught a wave, riding high, like the driver of a Greyhound bus. It tossed me right up onto the beach a little ways from them, hacking and spitting as I stood, pretending I knew what I was doing.

  Smoke from the outdoor grill blew by as the cooks started dinner. The air was softer here. The grass felt warm underfoot. I went to the tent for something to get the taste of seawater out of my head.

  Burt sat at a table in the corner, arms folded across his stomach, beard resting on his chest, gauze wrapped around his head like a soldier from World War I. Carl sat across from him, with Mary, the administrative coordinator, and Chris, the kid who made announcements. When I walked over there, Carl stood up and stepped away from the table. He still wore the yellow linen shirt, wrinkled like a boiled chicken.

  “I got a report that you were causing a problem last night at two A.M.”

  “I was trying to break down the door to Randolph Hall.”

  “Well, don’t let it happen again.” He was pretending to be angry at me, but he actually was angry, which made his pretending less convincing. I didn’t care. If after fifteen years he hadn’t figured out how to run this thing, it was his tough shit. Banging on a dorm door at two A.M. was nothing compared to crumbling buildings, unpaid tuition bills, housing spats, noise violations, student disappearances, stonewalling from the state, or any of the usual travel disasters, teacher flake-outs, broken computer printers, underage drinking, chest pains, lost wallets, dogs trapped in sweltering cars, food complaints, in-class threatening behavior, broken air-conditioning, bruised egos, leaking ceilings, rattling windows, psycho participants pleading for help. His mood was not my fault.

  “Didn’t you see me wave to you at breakfast?”

  “No.”

  His eyes lit up. They were a luminous green. The top of his face was mottled and shiny, while the lower part was loose and heavy, the color of steak, capillaries dark with iron.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “How are you?” His long gray hair looked slept on.

  “Great.”

  “How’s class?”

  “Fantastic. Carol Dugan’s doing a comic on being gang-raped as a child.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “And George Frost’s brother won the Navy Cross in combat in Vietnam, but they gave it to him after he was dead.”

  “God.”

  “There are a few really disturbing ones.”

  He looked crazed. “How can you stand it?”

  “Why are you looking at me that way?”

  “Did you really not see me wave to you at breakfast?” He was demented.

  “Yes, I thought you were saying hello. I didn’t know you needed anything from me.”

  “I need something.”

  “What?”

  He looked over at the wine table. I guess he needed a drink. I still had a gallon of seawater in my head and hopped up and down on one foot and instead it came pouring out my nose. Carl made his own sour face and waved for me to follow. We went up the porch stairs of the main building to his office, on the second floor. His shelves had books on seabird ecology and marine vertebrates, and novels and poetry by past summer faculty. He had a case of books on a table, signed hardback editions of Tom McLaughlin’s West Texas memoir, to be given as gifts to donors. The paintings on Carl’s walls were ones students had left behind. His windows looked out over the lawn, onto the scene below, conference attendees coming this way for dinner. I sat on the couch between piles of books, boxes of art supplies, poster tubes, and stacks of sweatshirts donated by the media mogul. He asked me to sign some of my posters, laid out on a table, for swag. I was flattered. He mentioned Solito and the book prize nomination and said it was good press for the conference. “We asked him to give a slide talk tonight.”

  “You bumped Dennis? That poor fucker.” I hated him and started laughing. Carl ignored me and asked if I could introduce Solito. I stopped laughing, because I had no choice. Faculty members were contractually obligated to participate in these things.

  Solito had had a similar reaction when Carl approached him. “No thanks, but maybe some other time.” Carl’s eyes blazed when he repeated those words. He told the kid that the conference had paid $1,200 to have his slide talk advertised on the radio.

  Carl handed me a copy of Solito’s book. On the inside flap, critics described it as “mesmerizing,” “simple and moving,” “a tale of suffering,” “a story of humor and courage.” I opened to the first page and it all came back to me, and was better than I’d remembered: the drawing of his mom, the smoke from her cigarette curling, catching her eye, reflected and dancing on the surface of a single teardrop. I went to the outer office, to Mary’s empty desk, to work on my intro, looking for reviews and articles. Carl followed and opened the freezer and took out a bottle of vodka, poured a drink, and sat in a chair by Mary’s desk, jingling his ice cubes. “So?” He gave me a leering look. “Having fun this year?” He wanted my dirt. He’d been standing over me when I’d knelt beside her on the softball field. He knew from Burt that I’d been at the clinic, and that it was her dormitory door I’d banged on at two A.M.

  “If you want me to do this, go away.”

  I found material on Solito. One reviewer used the word “voracious.” They called him versatile, a tinkerer, comedic, a magpie. They referred to the book as a “meticulously documented autobiographical triumph,” “real events in words and pictures,” and “a haunting graphic novel.” One reviewer wondered what Solito’s life would’ve been like if the United States hadn’t destroyed a legitimate Guatemalan government just beginning to enjoy the blessings of democracy, leaving behind death squads, poverty, and decades of civil war. I read the blurbs on the back: “His sensibility is utterly unique, his characters are utterly real.” The book was titled The Crossing: A Picto-Narra-Graphic Allegory. I pulled quotes and listed Solito’s honors, fellowships, and awards.

  But as I worked, I worried that audience members who knew me would look on in horror as I groveled in submission to a rising star. I worried that the ones who’d never seen me before would assume I was some sniveling ass licker trying to steal the limelight
. I worried that my envy and roiling hostility would muddle my words, or that I’d start cackling madly and drop my introductory notes, grab Solito by the collar, and kick the shit out of him. I worried that any attempt to illuminate his work would reveal my inferiority. But after I printed the introduction out and read it over, I couldn’t help but admire him, and felt protective even, proud to be associated with him, and maybe also a little swollen and greasy.

  An hour or so later, I was seated at the bottom of a steeply banked chemistry lecture hall, beside Tom, Trudy, Charlene, and Roberta. I had showered and changed, and Solito was late. It was a packed house, with people standing in the back. I glanced over at Carl, who shook his head, grinning furiously. Ten minutes passed. At a quarter after seven he gave me another look, and I got up to announce that the evening would be canceled. The room quieted as I turned to face everyone. At the top of the hall I saw Solito, coming through a side door in dark clothes, holding a folder. I went ahead and read my goddamned intro, standing behind a long, narrow, black-topped science table with goose-necked sink plumbing and gas valves, under a feeble overhead light. I felt myself entering a trancelike state, soothed by the sound of my own voice, yielding as elegantly as I had at breakfast. It was a thoughtful and affectionate introduction. The audience applauded.

  Solito walked down the steep staircase and went to the lectern and sipped some water as I took a seat. He turned on the overhead projector so that it flashed a bright blank screen. Hesitant, speaking slowly, in a practiced and self-deprecating tone, he said that it was a pain in the ass to be introduced by someone he admired, in a way that confused me. Some artists made him anxious and insecure, but I had reached out to him or whatever. He started talking about my book: “These days, bumbling antiheroes are commonplace, even quaint, but six years ago…” What the hell. He used a few of the same terms I’d used about his work, “powerful,” “piercing,” “blunt,” forcing a comparison between my forgotten comics and his internationally lauded life-and-death struggle across a continent, to make me look like a footnote maybe, a sideshow, while at the same time intentionally mocking my introduction, twisting the flattering and conciliatory things I’d said. I peered around to see if anyone else had noticed. It seemed that no one did. The compliments felt like punches in the stomach. I sat there dazed, not sure if I’d just been ripped apart.

  He put a page from his book up on the screen, giving us time to examine it, unhurriedly, then spoke with confidence about decisions he’d made in constructing each section. Then he repeated the process with another page. It took thirty-four minutes. The lights came up, and he answered questions with deep sincerity, as though the Dalai Lama had materialized in his saffron robe. He embodied the geopolitical dilemma, this problem of human migration. I am the border, the scar, the wound, the bridge between worlds. Big deal. Shut up. Blow me. He was calm and amiable. A man crawled around on the floor in front of me in what looked like a bulletproof vest. He held a camera in his hands and had another hanging from the vest. You wouldn’t have known that Solito hated the routine or how, as he’d told me at breakfast, these questions were destroying him day by day. He’d admitted in interviews and again here that certain scenes conflated his own experiences with those of a younger cousin who’d made the journey with him, who he’d cut entirely out of the story. He confessed to this audience something I hadn’t read in any article: that it was some third relative, and not him or the cousin, who’d been pulled off a bus at age four and placed in detention for months. They had the story, but that wasn’t enough. They wanted the story behind the story, they wanted to get the facts out of him, so they could decide for themselves whether his suffering was real.

  I woke up before dawn, gasping, suffocating, flopping around like a dying pigeon. We had no money. We’d lose the house. I felt that iron will, the force, the cult of Robin, the rules I had to live by. Did I even see her anymore, or did I only see things I imagined, the lie of my hate-filled projections, the cartoon of a wife I’d created?

  The best times were with them: these beautiful people who called me Daddy and were never afraid, who didn’t have a scary father and didn’t know I was crazy. At home I was a part of something beyond my understanding, whole evenings spent in a daffy haze of singing, clapping, lifting, swinging, blowing up tiny balloons, my face turning purple, touching and examining every inch of them, like a violinist inspecting his instrument, kissing their sticky, doughnut-smelling feet.

  It didn’t matter. It was never enough. I needed life beyond them. I wanted more: people, praise, battles, conquests. I wanted to travel beyond myself, to explode out and out and out.

  I thought of the monster who’d beat Amy and left her there bleeding. I couldn’t fly back in time to protect her. I felt the crust of blood on these sheets and thought chaotically of the eclipsing impenetrable blackness of her obscene fortune, strange tax breaks, Shenzhen factories, unbreathable air, Cardinal Performance Capital grinding out millions under byzantine debt structures. Solito’s wounded border, his continent of pain. Our hijacked country, sliding into rising seas. I saw Iris, Robin’s mom, seated at dinner, head bowed forward, ignored by us as she waited for death.

  I heard birds outside singing their wake-up songs, and felt myself tire of fear, like a rubber ball bouncing slowly to stillness, changing from night to day, from a night mind to a day mind, from fearful and blind to fearless and lucid. I understood why Amy married Rapazzo. She could use his money to reform education and eradicate poverty. Together they’d smash the old world with technocratic muscle and raise up the masses, that wad of scum beneath them. Or maybe that’s what she hoped, or maybe that’s not why she married him.

  I recalled our final moments on Sunday afternoon. We’d been screwing for an hour, she needed to leave, drive to New Hampshire and rescue Lily. Her wrist throbbed, the pain went all the way up into her jaw. She shivered. “Ask me to stay,” she said. I’d already imagined that first shitty one-line text she’d send and how that would excite me. She refused to put her clothes on. She loved the Barn and wanted to live here forever. But then, with her broken arm, she pointed out things she’d change, recalling the loftlike space of the ski chalet they’d once rented in Idaho, and some colonial-era money pit a friend of hers had renovated. She’d start with the windows, the kitchen, the plumbing and light fixtures, then scrunched her face and decided to gut the whole place.

  A canister of room freshener had been sitting on the night table beside the broken lamp, left there by the cleaning crew, and in a dubious and insulting way, she suggested places around the apartment that needed Febrezing, the kitchen walls splattered with cooking oil, the moldy shower fan and broken front door. The ants in the kitchen, the spiderwebs and grease stains. In thirty seconds, the place had become something to be fumigated or demolished. I went along with it, and suggested Febrezing the couch, my armpits, a few of the moldier conference participants, like Beverly, who used a walker and an old-fashioned cigarette holder and thought she was Norma Desmond. We laughed our heads off. Together we were sharp and quick. Then she pinched her eyes shut and launched herself forward in one motion, bent over, leaning her body against my legs, sobbing. I thought she’d somehow bumped her arm.

  “I’m so miserable,” she said. It really was that bad, or maybe it was because we’d been laughing, acting silly, free of our frozen resentments. “I’ve been this way for years.” Then she groaned like she’d been punched in the gut and said, “I never wanted this,” and I figured she meant all of it, not just him and their heavy contract and those obligations that required such obliterating concentration, but also us, this cheap plastic fantasy that got us through our days.

  It was the loneliness of her first pregnancy, nights alone in their overbuilt house in the woods, nursing at all hours, waiting for him to appear. “Staff up,” he’d said, refusing to lift a finger when she asked for help. It took a year or two for her to figure it out, to give up, wondering when he’d notice. Sharing the joys and heartbreaks—someone’s fi
rst tooth, someone’s first cartwheel or dance recital—with her nanny or cook or the guy who mowed the lawn. Shoved between meetings and vacations, cringing when he spoke, taking it. His adolescent tries at humor were lame, sexist, sometimes revolting. It was like life in the old days, before cassette tapes, when telephones had bells inside them that rang and rang, and ChapStick came in a metal sleeve, when a man spent his days how he liked, and a woman hoped he’d behave and show up for dinner. “Remember what I told you,” she said one night, covered in goose bumps, prickly with hatred, speaking to her daughters, who sat dumbstruck as her husband started to laugh.

  In the rain the bay looked frozen. To the east, three heavy gray military planes from the air base an hour south roared up the coast. I got in line for breakfast. Eva Rotmensch, the dancer turned actress I’d met at softball, was standing so close I could smell her. She wore her same tiny pink corduroy shorts and a purple rain slicker. I smiled and she said nothing as I reached across her for a miserable slice of Irish soda bread. She stepped around me but I couldn’t make eye contact. I felt invisible, historical. She had a thin body and breasts so high you could cup them in your hand like a firefly. The young man with the tattoo on his neck and fine golden skin, Ryan, the actor, stepped up behind her, and leaned over her shoulder as, together, they scanned the tent for a place to sit. They were groggy and beautiful, lean and muscled, and had obviously been screwing since the minute softball ended. I hadn’t actually seen Ryan in a shirt until now. Of course it had the sleeves cut off and showed his smooth shoulders. It might’ve been the first shirt he’d ever worn in his life. You could sense in them a kind of psychic unity or harmony that comes when two people form that radiant bond. I stood there, wretchedly buttering my toast, cautious, middle-aged, middle-class. I wanted to apologize to the generations that followed: You don’t have to get old. This was my mistake. I stepped past them carefully, eyes on my tofu scramble.