Who Is Rich?

by Matthew Klam

  On a clean sheet of paper I drew our little bungalow from the street, wooden porch, burnt lawn, the building planted squarely on the land. In the next panel I drew a tired man, characteristic receding hairline, long birdlike nose, him, me, kneeling in the glare of the television, folding laundry. In the third panel a woman sits on the rug beside him, in leggings and a yoga bra, stretching, her legs in a split. He’s watching South Park, one where Kenny is dead and the boys build a ladder to heaven to try to get ahold of his winning lottery ticket. In the fourth panel I drew Kenny. In a box beneath Kenny I wrote:

  Fuckless weeks, excused by parenting, had turned weirdly okay. Marriage had changed, become solid, had become newly grim as they learned, together, what it was to not be young.

  “Let’s hope they sleep,” the woman says. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  Clean, folded laundry fills the basket. They stand, hugging. She presses her face into his shoulder. He sniffs her hair. “It’s late,” she says, her way of saying no. He hugs her but keeps his frontal parts back from this deeper embrace, creating a shaft of space between them as he stands impassively.

  “What if,” she says, “we just keep being nice to each other for a few more days?”

  This is what stands for hope, when two people run up against the limitations of aging and married love. Then I roughed out a scene at the wealthy woman’s house in Connecticut, the hot couple going from room to room, past the egg-shaped tub, then rolling around on the floor in her closet.

  When I looked up, two hours later, it was as if no time had passed. I had eight pages of tight pencils, and four dense pages of notes. I stood and stretched. In a hidden cabinet in the bathroom I discovered a stash of clean sheets and towels, made the bed, gathered dirty dishes from around the apartment.

  The teacup sat on the kitchen table. It was cracked, the cracks stained, the handle gone. It had roses painted along the rim. I lifted the cup, and the earrings rattled. I dumped the earrings into my palm and held one up to the light. Easy enough to overlook while packing and leaving. Easy enough to miss if you’re crying. Easy enough to understand why the owner might avert her gaze at the sight of a gift given as a reward for tolerating spousal abuse. The stones were bluish white and packed with rainbows. A gift she didn’t want, for an act of punishment she hadn’t deserved, meant to signify obedience, humiliation, surrender, disgrace.

  I should’ve handed them to her while she was packing her clothes, but in the haze of emotion I’d forgotten, although I could’ve handed them to her before that, but maybe I didn’t want her thinking I was tracking her valuables. In her dorm room she’d asked me to remove them. I’d done nothing wrong. Of course I’d stolen them. Instead of feeling worse, I found mitigating thoughts distracting me. What if she’d left them here on purpose? What if this was how she’d decided to help me? Was she messing with my mind?

  I walked through the rain, clutching the earrings as if any jostling might cause their disintegration, and entered the computer room of Crabston Hall, where, in a darkened hush of still bodies clicking mice and keyboards, I began to construct a quick, witty note, to let her know I’d found her baubles. They were bigger than a pencil eraser, smaller than a raspberry. I searched the Web for tips on how to tell the difference between a real and a fake diamond, and estimated their value between $29.95 and $20,000.

  I would let her know, then toss them in the mail.

  I found myself opening our secret folder, rereading the very last email she’d sent, from the hospital, back in March. I’d forgotten those photos of Lily, in post-op, still sleeping, all tape and tubes. Before that, Amy had complained that her roofer had accidentally backed into her security gate, so now it wouldn’t open. A neighbor from the building in Manhattan where she and Mike owned their duplex said the Russian businessman in the $39 million penthouse had demanded board approval for new security cameras, locks, and doors, because he worried he’d be kidnapped off the roof.

  She didn’t need these earrings.

  Their wealth came from hundreds of millions in commissions sucked out of the Cardinal Capital Fund in untraceable fees, from the invested pensions of state workers, from the salaries of cops and teachers. Mike used those dollars to push reforms that turned dollars into votes, to disrupt a functioning democracy, to seize power for his own enrichment. He managed the savings of workers while maiming their rights through his philanthropy.

  Most people figure out how to get by, save some and waste the rest, while the thought of dominating humanity might pass by in a daydream. I personally had no longing for supremacy. I’d never thought about it growing up. My dad tried to make some dough but didn’t have the stomach for it. My mom saw her job as a way to give a little back.

  She’d spent her life in a red brick elementary school two towns over from ours in the New York suburbs, teaching music to ten-, eleven-, and twelve-year-olds. My parents now lived almost entirely off her pension. In her retirement, she taught piano and swam at the Y. For the last forty-seven years, she’d been cooking my dad’s meals. If, God forbid, she died before him, she’d need to remember to throw a chicken in the oven first, so he wouldn’t starve. I loved her with a confused and heated passion. Once or twice, early in her brief career, I think she sang on Broadway. As a kid, I’d go over to her elementary school to see the shows she staged. I quit going as soon as I got my driver’s license. A bouquet of flowers at the final bow, my mother walking out of the dark, reaching up to take them, then walking back into the dark. In the weeks before the show she’d play those old records, Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun, The Pajama Game, Oliver!, on a wooden phonograph in our living room. I knew those shows by heart, knew where each of those records skipped, and sang the songs accordingly.

  She led a fairly dull existence. Her youthful dreams fell away by necessity. Most people don’t have it in them to change the world, don’t harbor some secret fantasy so deeply buried and believed in that it gets confused with what’s real.

  Jerry accidentally destroyed the magazine. Marty ruined Hollywood, cable news, and FM radio. The Tennessee toad hoarded the treasures of all antiquity. Amy remembered the neediest, but she also owned a private jet and a live-in gardener, and caved to the whimsy of her redneck fascist owner.

  To all the world, she was the lucky one. But I knew the truth, and kept it a secret, this thing that she herself could not keep secret, couldn’t contain. She’d saddled me with it, infected me, inserted this sadness into me so that I went around burdened with it, tied to her. Now I’d be required to carry these valuables down the street to the post office, to mail them back to her, certified mail, heavily insured. Who would repay me? She could’ve made a real difference in my life, could’ve changed it forever with a flick of her pen. But instead, she left me here to rot.

  I added up everything I’d ever given her: Christmas sweater, accidental bracelet, blouse, necklace, in addition to the dinner I’d bought her here last summer, bouillabaisse, braised vegetables, plus the gas I’d used driving up and down the East Coast so I could detour to Connecticut to hump her in her closet. It came to four grand, or nearly 7 percent of last year’s income. Whereas 7 percent of her husband’s income was $8 million. If the stuff she’d sent me—sweater, scarf, Italian leather gloves—added up to $800, then she’d spent less, much less, proportionally speaking. I was a fucking lot more generous.

  I watched a video on the History channel with the volume down on the pitfalls of selling stolen goods to pawnshops. They interviewed criminals on what to say, how to act. I’d end up in jail or worse. I took notes.

  Vast marshes of cattails looked beleaguered in the rain. At the end of town I hit the highway with a hysterical sense of self-justification, guilt level holding steady, howling inner voices mostly suppressed. Looking back in my rearview mirror, I lost sight of town, and broke the spell of the conference.

  Thirty minutes later, I exited the highway and entered a quiet, stiff, old-fashioned, intolerant picture-postcard seacoast village, with a monument
to dead soldiers of World War I, strolling tourists, and geese floating in the pond. I missed the weirdness of my temporary home, the dildo stores and street buskers, the drag queens scaring children.

  The jewelry store was located inside the lobby of an old hotel. A woman seated under a bright light in the corner raised her head. A man in a suit came out of an office. Above us I noted closed-circuit cameras. It felt as though someone had taken the blunt end of a broomstick and banged it into my guts. We, my family, had decided to liquidate some heirlooms, I said. You gave them something airtight and unassailable and kept it short and sweet. He led me into his office and clasped his hands over a thick white pad covered in gem diagrams. He began listing his bona fides—licensed, certified—then talked about precision and magnification. “You can trust me,” he said, “because I trust myself.” I didn’t know what I’d been hoping for, but this was not going to work. I explained that we kept everything in a safe-deposit box in Rhode Island but I could come back as soon as my Aunt Bunny gave her consent. He nodded, ignoring me, then pointed to Mrs. Nelson, sitting behind the case, who happened to be even more highly certified than him, he said. “But we can’t advertise her certification without an AGS-approved lab.”

  It got worse. Historically, the trade in gemstones has been somewhat secretive, he explained, resistant to any kind of auditing or regulation. New developments had raised the reputation of the industry, helped standardize appraisal methods. This guy was some kind of fucking moralizing gemologist.

  “What percentage of jewelers are licensed?”

  “Oh, most.”

  On the shelf behind him were family photos, including one of him in a burgundy fez. He said something about an old lady who came by with a six-carat diamond. “I’ve been here for thirty-one years,” he said. “I’ve been named personally in people’s wills.” He’d done thousands of transactions. We made an appointment for next week, and I stood and thanked him, feigning relief at having found an honorable soul, and gave him my name, Dennis Fleigel. I assumed I’d be arrested as I stepped out of the hotel, handcuffed, maybe stabbed, waiting hungrily for the blade to part my flesh.

  I’d made a list of places to try within a hundred miles, and drove to the next one on it. The woman behind the counter needed proof of my ID, and sent me to the copier place two doors down. I got back in the car. Other places were too crowded or had gone out of business or had a bad vibe. One guy mostly worked with cuckoo clocks, beneath strips of peeling wallpaper.

  Twenty miles down the highway I reached a fusty resort town on the state line, the last place on the list. A single storefront window displayed fine jewelry. I had to be buzzed in. I didn’t give a shit anymore what happened.

  “What if I have something to sell?”

  He wore an orange golf shirt and held a newspaper, folded in thirds.

  “What if I found it?”

  He looked bored. “Am I the lost and found?”

  “But how does this work?”

  “I’m not a broker.” He wore a big silver chain. “Typically, I want to get paid.” He motioned with his hand. I gave him one of the earrings. He examined it with the loupe. “Does it have papers?”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about. “Just tell me what it’s worth.”

  “A piece like this,” he said, but didn’t finish. He handed it back to me. “Take it to New York. You won’t do better. But take it somewhere else, and if he offers more, then you know I’m fucking you. If you can do better with him, do it, but you won’t. That’s why I say, go somewhere else.” There were cards on the counter. This store had two other locations, in Palm Beach and Rotterdam.

  “What if it’s insured?”

  “Not my concern. If you have insurance and you get rid of the piece, cancel the policy because you don’t own it anymore.”

  I asked if there was a way to identify it, repeating what the first guy said about laser whatever.

  “Oh, what a pain in the ass.”

  “But if it’s on there?”

  “You take it off.” I asked how. He looked irritated. “You polish it.”

  The cops would find me. Insurance investigators. A cuckolded billionaire with every kind of connection would take my life and pulp it, hire a ninja, God knows what, sink me into debt that would bury my grandchildren.

  “They got these things now measure every angle, every facet. It’s bullshit. One cut and the weight changes, it’s a different stone. Look, they got this stuff helps people sleep better at night. Good for them.” He picked up the loupe again, annoyed. “You got the other one?”

  I couldn’t move. He thought I was being coy. He closed his hand.

  “It’s funny because you can hold it in your fist, but it’s worth a lot of money.” He smiled. He’d been foggy when I’d walked in but had fully woken up. “I have to look at it under the light and weigh it.” He turned and motioned for me to follow him into the back. I figured I’d be shot in the head when I stepped through the doorway.

  “Someone walking in off the street with a piece like this? It’s rare.” He flipped on a bright light and talked about the stone while he looked at it under a microscope, describing the thing in technical terms, jotting down notes. Behind him was a flat steel door painted beige that I continued to stare at for the next ten minutes, trembling like a fish. I shook the way Amy had, last summer, on the beach. I felt most alive when I was doing something rotten.

  “What’s this?” he said. I froze. “A stone taken out of the ground. Hey look, if we left these things buried, nobody would know. The world could go to hell tomorrow and this stuff ain’t gonna help. But the labor involved in digging them out, plus they’re rare, and people like ’em. D color, flawless, three carat and above, you’re talking about an investment, easily transportable, and they hold their value. A few of them is a house on the beach.”

  I took the other one out of my pocket and slid it across the desk for him to weigh and examine. Security cameras, bank records. Of course I’d get caught, because getting caught had been my goal, that’s what I’d been hoping for, real punishment, real pain. I called myself every disgusting name I could think of. Then I was happy because I could say no, walk out. I hadn’t gone through with it yet. Then I was happy, thinking I still might.

  He stuck his glasses on his head and gave me the grading info, the offer per carat, then multiplied it by the weight of the two diamonds. The number had no shape. I tried to find its contours, its boundaries. The upper limit of my earlier estimate had been off by $221,000.

  Who would play softball with something like that in their ears?

  I hated money. And I hated people who had money, it was disgusting, it made them do weird stuff. I’d rather suffer. I knew how to suffer.

  “In a case like this, what I’ll do, I have a few ideas of who I’ll call. And to be honest, I have to throw some percentage on top and hope I don’t queer the deal. I want you to know I’m paying the most, but I want him to think he’s paying the least. Although, look, these days, anyone is happy with a sale.”

  He picked up the phone and asked whether I wanted a bank wire or a check. His face went slack as someone answered, and he opened the steel door. “It’s me,” he said. “Put Murray on the phone.” He pulled the door closed behind him.

  Dear God in heaven, I wanted a sump pump. In a heavy storm I could take a thousand wet-vac buckets out of my leaking basement, up the back stairs, and dump them in the yard. Sometimes the wet-vac accidentally sucked up pieces of the crumbling floor. Sometimes when it rained, weird stuff from the kitchen sink, like Cheerios and macaroni, floated up out of the basement drain.

  The earrings sat in a velvet-lined dish on his desk.

  I also had some lingering dental issues. The crown cost $1,600. Or maybe the root canal cost $1,600 and the crown was more. I’d been chewing crookedly on that side for a year. And the retaining wall in my backyard had fallen down and spilled into the alley in chunks. I’d gotten two ominous warnings from the city and a $4,000
estimate from a structural engineer.

  I wanted to knock out the pre-K tuition, call an oil-burner repair man, open a retirement account, start a college fund. The murmuring through the door, not the content so much as the cadence, somehow mediated the experience. There was still a layer of protection between reality and me. They were discussing the potential sale of some hot rocks. This guy was either crooked, stupid, or crazy, or maybe he knew the trade well enough to handle a high-grade diamond with no documentation.

  I also needed life insurance, a new dishwasher, and those screens that keep leaves out of your gutters. All I’d ever wanted was to save her from him, but I had been kidding myself. They belonged together.

  There were too many stories of stupid, vicious, dangerous, cruel, or disgusting things he’d done to her, and to his kids, things she’d encouraged or enabled. Here are your secrets. I don’t want them anymore. I’m giving them back to you, in a story I’ll write and donate to mankind. Better yet, I’ll write to Rapazzo, tell him I’ve been banging his wife, send a few naked pictures of her and threaten to splatter them and every horrible thing she’d ever said about him all over the Web unless he promised to be nice to her. I’ll write to the SEC, I’ll do something. I stood, grabbed the earrings, and walked down the street in the rain to my car.

  College fund, new front yard, a year of unmolested time to work on comics. Driving back to campus, I would forget the number, then remember it again. A few seconds would pass, then it would come back, along with everything I could do with it. I would play with the number, subtract all or part of our credit card debt, another five figures laid out in horrifying installments to the IRS, other unpleasant amounts to the bank and my mother-in-law and whoever had signed the note on my car.