by Matthew Klam
It hurt to wait patiently at the coffee table. I wanted to merge. We had somehow known just when to push, when to grind, and when to be still, locked together. A sadness came over me, then the whiplash of guilt. God, what screwing we’d accomplished. I wanted her in a terrible way, wanted to curl up in a ball and cry for what couldn’t be. Rain spilled off the edge of the tent, splattering into mud.
Farther down the breakfast line they were talking about who vomited last night, at what hour, and the funny thing someone named Kaitlyn had said. Sadness gutted me. Chris from the office made announcements in his slicker. I sat at a table of familiar faces and couldn’t help thinking they were such awful people. Tom imitated the German accents of the TV crew from Sunday, annoyed by the demands of his fame, working it into a routine that got old. Roberta was feeling youthful, and wanted to try ecstasy, and wondered if there was anything to it. We all agreed that we needed to lose weight. Heather explained that her dad had died of alcoholism. He’d died bad. Only by writing about it did she find some peace. This sounded canned, like a line from a lecture. The rest of them had gone drinking last night, and stayed out late, and looked fragile and bloated.
Ryan and Eva walked by. We had been young once, too. Vicky sat beside me, scowling at her coffee, wondering where I’d disappeared to last night after the slide talk. Winston Doyoyo sat silently on the other side of me, frowning up at his wife, Ingrid, a tall Scandinavian woman who walked back and forth across the tent. At last, she put down a plate of food in front of him and sat, exhaling loudly.
Tabitha confessed that there was no director, no financing or stars attached. She wanted to close the TV deal so she could get paid, and went on humble-bragging, repeating the producer’s name, Kevin this, Kevin that, which infuriated Dennis. He wore a starched white linen shirt, the collar sharply pressed. His face looked pink and cold.
Ingrid spoke in a flat, administrative tone, with almost no accent, explaining that the money from these conferences came in handy, that the Nobel Prize Winston had won ten years earlier had gone into the houses of his children and a hotel in Pretoria that had burned to the ground. Winston watched her. She wanted us to understand that there was nothing left, that they lived off his appearance fees. He had an omelette in front of him, with watercress heaped on one side, and sat, incredulous, with something sadistic going on in his face, stronger than interest, more like disgust. Then he turned to me. “How old are you?” he asked.
“Forty-two.”
“I’m seventy-eight. Get me a fucking napkin!”
I did, and noticed Frederick and Ilana at a table in the corner, at the far end of the tent, both with freshly wet hair. A few minutes later, we all got up and headed to class.
Up ahead, Vicky made her way across the field, with a cigarette in her mouth and a cup of coffee in each hand. Smoking in the rain seemed especially morbid. There were years when she and I had eaten every meal together, sat beside each other at slide talks, tramped on the beach late at night. Last year, until halfway through the conference, when I met Amy, Vicky and I had been close. There was that feeling of knowing what the other one thought, while Dennis ruined our meal, or in the middle of a particular moment at a reading or a play, like the one about a giant baby, played straight by a grown man in a diaper who needed a shave and was doing, essentially, Reverend Jim from Taxi.
I caught up to her and we walked together. As we did, I linked my arm in hers and grabbed her cigarette and took a long drag, and in a German accent I wondered what she thought of Solito’s slide talk last night, mispronouncing words with a Hessian flair. “Vut vuz it?” I asked. Was it autobiography if parts of it were conflated? Were conflated parts definitively fiction? What if fiction was mostly made of facts? She didn’t care, and misquoted Faulkner, with Kissinger’s Bavarian lilt, but said she thought there was something “litigious” in his work, and that his answers had sounded strange.
I’d had feelings for her, while we’d been lying together on the beach on a bedsheet, of a sibling bond, answering questions about Robin and my kids, bumming her cigarettes and listening to stories of her ex-boyfriends. Two of them were dead. The first one either choked to death or had a heart attack in a restaurant. She’d kept him alive until the ambulance arrived. The other one got hit by a New York City bus. And although I was subordinate to her, there were similarities in our art, at least with her more cartoony work—a piece about life in a Mexican garbage dump, another about donkey basketball, and one of painted color fields with scribbled questions about porn and eye-popping insults directed at her audience, interspersed with detailed drawings of an assault she’d survived in a subway station.
I saw them crossing the field, heading to the auditorium, walking close. Ilana and Fred were of average height, with the same dark coloring. I jealously studied their movements. There’d always been a laughable attempt to hide it, moving through a crowd, mixing in. There was a clear, quiet, concentrated energy between them, as though together they’d escaped a burning building, and were charged somehow, connected on a profound level. We got to the door of Fine Arts.
“See you later, fräulein.”
She dropped the accent and asked again why I’d missed drinks and where I’d been. I said I’d been tired and had gone to bed. I thought that if she didn’t look directly at me, I could say it, especially since it was true. But I’d been living with my story for so long, and had muddied the elegiac and ecstatic elements with terror and shame, and hoped that talking about it would give me some relief.
“Do you know her from somewhere else?” She crinkled her face at me. “The one who broke her arm?” She raised a hand above her head to indicate a person of great height. “The glamazon?” She rolled her eyes at me. “That big Wookiee!”
They were curious, but also pissed. They didn’t want a happiness to go unsullied. They wanted the story, but if they had the story, they wanted the story behind the story, to punish the ones who had grabbed them and held their attention.
I was late for class but wanted to say one thing and be done with it. I thought she might understand. I didn’t need to go on the way Frederick had about tearful Christmas phone calls, but I wanted someone to know. The seriousness of my expression implied that we’d destroyed each other’s lives.
“Do you meet on the sly? Do you think of her when you’re with your wife? Are you good at lying? Do you feel like a sleaze?” I said yes. “Do you know the husband? Do your families go on vacations together? Does it get easier with practice?” I said no.
My classroom smelled lived in, pre-breathed, bodies but not enough air. I could see by the rate of progress that several of the students had pulled overtime since yesterday’s class. Someone had spent the night, and lay wrapped in a beach towel at the back of the room, fast asleep. By the powdery bottoms of her feet, I knew it was Mel. I went around quietly with the handout I’d made yesterday, the guide to scanning and software. George had done a drawing of the interior of the bar at the infantry club at Fort Benning, circa 1965. I envied the steady breathing and quiet noises of humans at work. The intensity was palpable, but they were taking too long to draw. From this point they’d be stuck here, breaking for meals, powering through the night, blearily uploading their work, fighting at the scanners, complaining about someone’s music, stapling or stitching the binding by hand.
Helen Li was slated to start med school in Boston in the fall, but she still had a few things to say about growing up in Taiwan, where the school day was twelve hours long, with homework until two A.M. If she swore, her mother smacked her with a shoe. The sadists who ran the school hit kids with books, made them line up and squat, then kicked them over like dominoes. At the far end of the room in her spot by the sinks, Rachel sat with her head bent, scribbling, wearing earbuds, lips moving, hearing voices, going hard, talking to herself.
I stood behind the printing press and listened. What I heard instead was Amy’s breaths coming faster, those sweet, soft sounds. Then her tired voice, fumbling, reconciled: �
�Even if I’m alone for the rest of my life, I’ll never be as sad and lonely as I am now, married to him.” I wrote this down on the back of the handout. I had to stop fetishizing my cartooning blockage and look past my crippling envy to see the complexity in her, the potential storylines, huge ones of corrupt elements of power, but also small ones of people living in these fugue states of depressive, combative paranoia. Some cruel, killing part of her had flicked away the truth of my financial woes. Something despicable had risen up in me as I’d witnessed her crumbling façade, by the flagpole, then on the ball field, and in the clinic—an inadvertent meanness.
I wavered, in the middle of my classroom, drowning in this soup of confusion, accosted by fragments. I was seven inches taller than my wife and outweighed her by sixty pounds. My anger had frightened me, so I could imagine how it must’ve been for her. I felt an animal terror. I attacked out of fear of being less than, or when Robin treated me like the nanny or cook, or when Amy saw me as a gigolo, moments when I’d lost my individual identity. Emotional commitments and lifelong guarantees had turned me into an object of someone else’s neuroses. I used Amy to divert my aggression away from Robin. In contrast to Mike, I was a goddamned hero. I humiliated others, swiped at phantoms, and feared for my life. I had to get it all down.
I needed concentrated hours, days of quiet in a nurturing atmosphere, to experiment with tools and materials, shielded from parenting, domestic hostility, taxing freelance work and students, in a place where I could safely lose myself in the process and surprise my eyes with emerging themes, to build out with images that mapped our emotional landscape, to explode out from there with memory and imagination. I made a few thumbnails, then got up and paced around the room.
Rebecca had added a new character to her ambulance scene, a paramedic in charge. He looked like a hockey enforcer, with a lined scowl and a heavy brow, sitting in the ambulance across from the younger Rebecca, counting off as she performed CPR, telling her to stay calm.
“He’s dying,” the hockey enforcer explains. “You’re not dying. You’re okay.”
“The old man’s rib cage crackled like brittle twigs,” Rebecca wrote in a narrative box. “I worried his skin would tear.”
In the second panel, the old man flatlines. In the third, the other paramedic bags him, forcing oxygen into his lungs. In the fourth, she hits him with paddles, over and over, to bring him back to life. Since yesterday, her pencil sketches had grown in complexity: the faces looked disturbed, the old man radiated illness. It was tight, spare, intense. I wanted her to start inking. She said she thought she might toss it in the garbage. I asked why.
She tapped her pencil against the side of her glasses, wincing. “Because I killed him.” I wasn’t sure what she meant. “Not on purpose.”
“Okay.”
“He’s not the only one.”
“You killed other people?”
“I saved other people.” She made a serious face. “I killed mice.”
“You what?”
She showed me how she’d done it, in a lab in college: yanked the animal by the ends, snap, pop. You could also gas it or chop off its head. She thought her story demanded an exploration of her role in each of these deaths. I knelt beside her and told her there wasn’t enough time.
Carol’s comic had structure, like Rebecca’s, but almost no dialogue, and just a few captions. She’d knocked in the background of the snowy, beer-drenched drawings I’d seen yesterday. The first three panels were almost identical, as if this scene of boys grimly drinking inside a car in a snowstorm went on, in a loop, forever. In the fourth panel, a girl sat on the front seat, in her underwear, lit by the radio dial, kissing one boy, the hand of another on her breast, and two more in the backseat laughing and talking about her body. Even though I pretty much knew what was coming, reading this scene broke my heart.
The second page showed four nearly identical panels of the cassette deck radio dial. The drawings were dark. The repetition slowed time down, building tension. In each panel, she’d written a caption in a box. In the first one, “You try to hold it in, but eventually the pain will express itself.” In the next she wrote, “It’s better to face it directly than have it come out through illness or failed relationships.” In the third one she wrote, “Recovery takes place.” In the last one, “Healing takes place.”
Maybe it worked on me because I knew the victim. Maybe it’s easier to push this stuff aside when the cartoonist isn’t sitting right there. She had one arm laid on the table, pencil smudges on her nose, and ashy graphite all over her hands. She put her hand over the drawing of the girl.
“I wish I had a better story to tell about that day, but I don’t.” She’d enrolled in my class as part of her recovery. “It hurts to think about, but I’m the one telling the story now. I’m the one who gets to decide.” She lived in town and had an appointment with her shrink this afternoon. She took out a red bandanna and blew her nose. At the next desk over, Rebecca glanced up at her, then went back to her own work.
I made some practical suggestions for both of them, and threatened them with tomorrow’s deadline, and walked to the far corner and stared at the floor. If someone looked up, I tried to hypnotize them with my mind. Tell the story. The story is in you. It has to come out. I could hear pencils on paper. I remembered standing here last year, and the year before that, trying to will them through.
“Went to a party last night,” my new friend, Angel Solito, explained during the coffee break, his shiny black hair pushed into a rooster comb, wearing his hoodie and a checkered ska belt. The rain had forced both classes to congregate by the woodstoves. He’d begun by warmly and politely thanking me for facilitating last night’s discussion, then complained that journalists had been hounding him all morning by phone and email. The party had taken place at some donor’s swanky beach digs. “I met a man from Tennessee,” he said. The man owned the largest private collection of Greek statuary on earth, he explained, and had invited him to come visit.
I swept the floor, scrubbed the stains off my sheets, and put the ladder back where I’d found it. Threw away her broken eyeglasses and her playing cards, and cleaned off the table so I could work. Rain splattered onto my mattress. I tried and failed to close the skylight, went back to my notes and sketchbook and started to hyperventilate. Like Rebecca, I’d have to omit key pieces of information, conflate others. These omissions would absolve me of certain sins. Like Carol, I had only one story to tell, didn’t want to tell it, but knew I had nothing else to say.
In The Crossing, Solito attempts to go north on foot and on buses. Later he clings to the tops of freight trains. In those scenes, there’s nothing in front of the train, no horizon, no destination. We don’t know where this boy will end up, and that’s really the story of children trying to reach the United States from Latin America. I still had Carl’s copy, and noticed the fine brushwork of tree branches that ducked down to knock sleeping children off the train. I reread the scene of him getting robbed and beaten in Jalisco, before crossing the border, a child walking into the Arizona desert with some men who later died of dehydration.
I’d been trying to lower my anxiety level, to make Solito’s accomplishments seem accessible, to inspire myself. I wanted to be great, too, wanted prizes and love from strangers. Instead, his stuff superimposed itself over mine. The reviews I’d read last night, the apoplectic praise and hysteria over his talent, youth, and ethnicity all went to work on me. His experiences were historic, monumental.
But until the day people stopped wishing they could cram their spouse into a dumpster, my story was relevant, too. Until we stopped accepting the destructive force of monogamy, until we stopped constructing other selves in secret, I had the edge: my story had yet to be told. And given the intensity of these past days, I held reserves of emotional capability no one could match.
Maybe you had a crush on a co-worker, or came to find some erotic charge in the dimpled smile or soothing voice of a neighbor or friend. You began to ta
mper with your repressions, the prison of your own making; you craved the slightest attention and the physiological boost that came from easy conversation with some sympathetic, similar-minded soul. Was this nourishing emotional connection a violation of trust? Your life felt rehearsed, performed; your most significant gestures only mimicked real emotion. Routine insincerity had inadvertently hollowed out your entire existence. What passed for candor became an act of nostalgia, loyalty, compulsion. Your drives and urges got sublimated into oblivion, for the good of something better, renovated master bath, shorter commute, authoritative parenting, the load-bearing walls of your house cracking and settling all around you. You became ashamed of senile arguments about how to sauté broccoli, you tuned out bleating babies and bug-eyed children, so that they had to scream to reach you. You peeked through the bars of your cage. Your heart jumped from a five-second exchange with a fair-skinned, ginger-haired stranger in the supermarket’s frozen-food aisle. Married life was too strict, isolating, cruel. You could still recognize a certain look in the eyes of a friend when she laughed at your jokes, touching your elbow, sitting beside you at dinner, and said good night with a damp kiss and a flicker of pain, a reflection of your better self, possible lives, better days. Was there someone out there who wanted to enter an immersive illustrated fictional experience on this provocative matter? I shuddered at the thought of the mind-boggling complexities involved. Years of intense labor lay ahead.
I read through my sketchbook and found notes and drawings that fed ideas and strategies. Another world revealed itself to me, with lyrical imperatives. I made a few thumbnails. I imagined a web of unpleasant characters, trafficking in artistic misery, free markets, abstruse financial loopholes. I saw several moves ahead, my hand tracing lines only I could see, hovering somewhere between work and play, between necessity and escape. And yet, even as I worked, I knew it would cost me. Robin would withhold her body forever, or kill me in my sleep. I’d never live it down. Still, the sketches gave me pleasure.
