Who Is Rich?

by Matthew Klam

  I wasn’t sure whether to be afraid. On the highway, drivers in cars going the opposite way looked worried, too. The world was the same for them. They feared rain, they feared life. I tried Robin. She didn’t pick up. I called Adam. He was afraid, couldn’t sleep, had planned to do the principled thing and quit, but hadn’t quit yet because he had three kids and no one else had offered him a job. We wondered if there would be more cuts, but the damage was done. Everybody good had left. Eventually we discussed my next assignments. We agreed that the future looked terrible, and then I hung up and didn’t worry about his sorry ass anymore.

  I made a list in my head of a dozen former colleagues in advertising. I would send them chatty notes. I’d give my former publisher a call. “Hey, asshole, thanks for giving up on me,” I’d say. “I’m back from the dead.” I’d send him new pages in a month or two. I needed to register on a job board for teachers in fine arts, graphic design, illustration, and cartooning. I needed to write a letter of interest and dust off my CV.

  I called my parents. My dad had been answering the phone since he’d retired, but I still wasn’t used to it. Of course I only ever called to talk to her, but she was out. He liked to start in the middle of a sentence, as if I had just watched an instant replay of his morning and had called to hear the follow-up on the latest rash between his toes or a dead bat in the attic. Maybe if I’d taken the money and could give my parents $75,000 I would’ve felt different, but I felt the same, suffocated by adult burdens, amazed and enraged after almost two decades of this feeling that no one had warned me about how hard it would be. He’d spent his morning raking heaps of algae out of his friend’s scuzzy pond, to use as fertilizer in his garden. His elbow hurt, but he’d saved a couple hundred bucks. He offered an update on his macular degeneration, and how much that bastard charged for eyedrops, and the sixty-eight-dollar co-pay. Then he waxed poetic about the benefits to his intestines of unsweetened cranberry juice with a teaspoon of lecithin granules. He talked to me now the way he’d always talked to her, offering a kind of inventory that I tried to discourage.

  Bioflavonoids, grapefruit, wheatgrass, ginger.

  I think that at least half the world grows up with a parent who’s scary and a little nuts, and he’d been mine, and I forgave him a long time ago, but I didn’t want to hear about his granules, I didn’t want to be his friend through this next phase of degeneration, and I sure as hell didn’t want to be his wife.

  “I love you, Dad.”

  “Give those kids a kiss from us,” he said. “Tell ’em we’re nuts about ’em.” When he let me go, I felt worse. We were a defective bloodline, destined, blighted; my fears had been confirmed.

  I kept drifting back to the beautiful discovery in the teacup and the conditions under which the earrings had been lost. I was meant to take by other means what ordinary life had withheld. But I couldn’t do it. A quiet descended, a simple and damning quiet of living within my means. I’d ended up right where I belonged, and it was looking to be a bad rest of my life. Amy was the one who’d earned those things. She’d lived through brutality. She had paid.

  Fog had come in and covered the town, and I parked on campus and walked down Main Street. A fine, warm rain blew sideways, right into my open mouth, the bay at high tide, waves washing into the street, big puddles everywhere, people taking cover on the steps of town hall. I went into the post office and stuck her earrings in a box. The line snaked around the lobby. It didn’t seem to be moving. The woman in front of me wore a waitress apron and tapped her phone. A wet, smelly dog with sandy feet who didn’t seem to belong to anyone trotted into the lobby and shook himself, prompting obscenities. I called to him, and held open the back door, and on second thought followed him out. He cut between the post office and a motel on a soggy path to the beach. He watched me, ready to play fetch. I ripped the earrings out of the box and threw them into the bay.

  A little farther down Main Street, someone had laid rubber floor mats in the doorway of the hardware store. People pushed in and out. Two little boys bought stickers for their skateboards, and a girl behind the counter patiently unrolled their wet money, three dollars, flattening the bills.

  I went into stores, touching all the things I couldn’t afford, waving at clerks, requesting information. I sat in furniture, smelled genuine leather. A small boy walked past me carrying a turtle. He held it gently by the edges of its shell, beaming, delighted.

  The money was like a noxious cloud. It wouldn’t let me breathe. I keep thinking of what I should’ve done with it. I went back to Stoler’s Jewelry. They greeted me warmly. We were old friends. I sheepishly placed three wire bracelets on the counter, thin pieces of junk for sixty-five dollars, for Robin, paid, and walked out to the beach again and stared at the bay, yanked off my shirt and ran out there in my sneakers, thrashing around in the dark green water, grabbing handfuls of hard sandy bottom, then quit, grieving, and slapped myself dry. I went into a children’s store and calmed down, and bought a rubber alligator for Beanie and a pack of hair bows for Kaya. My soaking-wet sneakers made clown farts.

  Back on campus, I stood in the lobby of the main building, listening to Carl, a puddle forming at my feet. The whole conference was still buzzing from last night’s slide talk, he said, most of what comes along is just filler, great work is rare, but blah blah. It was clear that he’d hired Solito without having seen even a page of his work, saw it for the first time yesterday. In six years, Carl had never asked me to give a slide talk on my own work at this fucking conference, although my first year here I’d given a lecture on the history of comics, starting with the cave paintings of Lascaux, the Codex Mendoza, and Commodore Perry’s arrival in Japan with Punch cartoons; eleven people had shown up. When he noticed that I had nothing to add, he pulled an envelope from a wad of them in his binder.

  “In case I don’t see you tomorrow,” he said. It was my check, $2,750. After all these years, he’d given me a raise.

  I sat on the porch at the back of the main building in a wicker love seat, looking out at the flagpole in the rain. Kaya picked up, sounding normal, a credit to the supernatural healing powers of a four-year-old kid. I didn’t interrupt as she let go a partly understandable solid wall of words. Something about Sammy, a cross-eyed three-year-old from camp, and Rigby, a boy who never smiled and chased her around with a territorial scowl, and Molly, who told her there were “witches in our country.”

  “There are no witches, honey.”

  “If you see a witch, you gotta chop off da head.”

  “Did Molly tell you that?”

  “Yah. Do you know dat spiderwebs can trap your hands?”

  “Did Molly tell you that, too?”

  In the background I heard the mason jar of macaroni being opened, the lid rattling on the counter, the sound of pasta hitting the glass measuring cup, the whoosh as it spilled into the pot. I could feel in Robin’s silence her exhaustion, disorientation, and rage. I did my best to set Kaya straight on the occult. I could feel the kitchen’s silent appraisal of me, of my acts of liberation, my remorse and rationalization, and of my failed experiments with the plutocracy.

  I could almost see the newspapers piled on a dining room chair, the cat lying on Robin’s dirty gym stuff, old mail on the kitchen table, barf rags, nursing bras, filthy socks, running sneakers, Tupperware from old lunches, swim goggles, shredded sweetener packets, tubes of sunblock. I could hear Beanie in the bouncer we clipped to the kitchen doorway, spronging up and down on a steel spring as he stared ahead like a little zombie as, somewhere in the distance, a recording sang to him from Winnie-the-Pooh.

  I wondered about her meeting with Katavolos, who had followed her to the Nature Channel and now ran the network. She took the phone from Kaya. When she finally spoke, she sounded less broken than I’d feared, surely benefitting from my absence, the simplified power dynamic, the relief of assaults upon her soul from my critical glances. “Please tell your daughter not to go in Mommy’s bed tonight.”

  I hea
rd a small protest in the distance, “But my baby was crying,” though she meant Polly, her doll. Robin didn’t say anything. Kaya asked, “When will Polly grow up?”

  “She won’t grow up. She’s made of plastic.”

  “Well, she might be made of person or she might be made of plastic or she might be made of bones.”

  “Well,” Robin said, “she’ll be fine either way.” Then she let out a sigh and I waited. If she’d gone on to say that the feds had been looking for me in connection with a class B felony for trafficking in stolen property, or for oral and sexual mishandling of a Mrs. A. D. Rapazzo of Crumberry, Connecticut, or that a gang of hired killers had slit the tires of her car, dismembered the cat, and burned down our porch, or that she’d somehow gotten wind of my shenanigans, delivered in an envelope by a private investigator, I wouldn’t have been surprised. I would’ve been ready. The events of these past days had stomped all the juices out of my adrenals, but I could still feel the terror, the consequences of my choices, the potential horror of real loss, the jewel of my life, lost.

  Then she would explain the malfunctioning psyche of an emotional cripple like me, defended against vulnerability, predisposed to fantasy, pain avoidance, and cynicism. Forty years earlier, as I’d been lying there in my diaper, some bored lady had flirted with me, told me I was irresistible, and I had the valence for it, and believed I was a Casanova. The more recent bored housewife who’d picked me out of the crowd at art camp had merely prolonged the delusion, blocking genuine intimacy and the intolerable awareness of death. Then Robin would inform me that the locks had been changed, that her dad’s attorney had filed a restraining order and I’d never see my children again, that as individuals we were nothing but together we’d made these miraculous beings, that I’d be broke for the rest of my days supporting them, as they drifted farther away and those bonds dissolved and turned toxic and became the unworkable torment of my life.

  “We need floss.”

  “Okay.”

  “And toilet paper.”

  “Yokey-dokey.” I said I’d get some on the way home.

  She carried the phone to the table and put it on speaker while they ate.

  “The meeting went fine.”

  Sounds of chewing. Beanie gabbled away in the language of his people.

  “There’s no job, but they offered me an episode of a show on what used to be the Crime Channel, which is now called something else and is part of the War Channel, which is now called the American Century Channel. We do crime reenactments, things like historical reenactments of train robberies from the Wild West. Next week I have to fly out to New Mexico to blow up a train.”

  “Who offered you an episode?”

  “What?”

  “Who did you meet with?”

  She didn’t sound evasive or annoyed—just detached, free of obligation to me, to my structural assaults.

  “Was there a couch in his office?” She didn’t answer. “Did you let him feel your boobs?” She laughed. “Did he put his hands in your pants?”

  She laughed again and said she hadn’t been wearing pants. “But he wanted to know why I’d leave Connie’s production company for this. I think he thinks I’m following him around.” It was a big, throaty, confident laugh, a sound of relief that reminded me that for the last couple years I’d been living with a depressed person, that it had infected us both, that together we’d grown into people who, upon waking, did not look out the window to examine the day’s weather. Then she told me about some old men who ran the company, who she’d bumped into in the halls, who’d grabbed and hugged her and asked where she’d been all these years. The channel those guys started in the mid-eighties had been a place for beautiful nature documentaries, flora and fauna, with a stress on cinematography, shows about world history and anthropology. For years now, the channel had been in a race to the bottom.

  Then she gloated about her lunch meeting with Karen Crickstein, and all the old friends she’d heard about, former staff EPs and VPs who’d screwed up, aged out, or got fired, or who’d put out their own shingle and were hanging on, hoping for the big comeback.

  I listened to them eat. Everything would go back to the way it was, only worse, because I’d given up. No more tricks, no gimmicks, no narcotics or lubricants, no funky aftertaste. No fake hysteria or narcissism, no more armoring self-hatred. Just dinner, stories, singing, bedtime, followed by calling, begging, weeping, and throwing up, until at some point, it was quiet. Just a feely guy, full of zinger insights and stunning sensitivity, preparing with humility for true interpenetration by and with his life person. How do you do it? How do you span the nothingness? Through love, through music, through art, through the sharing of food, fucking, and experiences. Inside my chest I imagined a lump of unpolished quartz, pink and cold, with veins of lighter pink in a cloud of white. The cloud, the aftermath of an explosion, had fine debris floating inside it, still to the visible eye but with some radiant nuclear dust, moving out, exploding.

  “Oh, by the way, the washing machine broke. Stuff’s all wet at the end.”

  “You have to run the spin cycle a second time.”

  “I did.”

  “And did it work?”

  “Yes.”

  She didn’t ask whether I’d seen the low balance in our checking account, didn’t say a word about it, didn’t wonder whether I’d lost my mind, and when it was clear that she wouldn’t, I asked her. She said quietly that she’d ordered four pairs of boots and was planning to return three. The account had been wildly overdrawn, but I was so heartened by this news of her spending that I decided to announce my raise, and assured her that I would deposit the check ASAP, but she wasn’t listening or didn’t care.

  “Don’t poke your brother with a fork.”

  “I just wanna toch.”

  “Cut it out, sweetie.”

  “He likes it, Momma!”

  Beanie screamed. Robin threatened Kaya with the loss of weekend television. He sat in a chair clipped to the side of the table, and clocked his sister warily. When it seemed that Kaya had lost interest in poking him, he went back to his applesauce.

  “I’m finished.”

  “Eat your avocado.”

  “What’s dessert?” Robin told Kaya to bring the cookies.

  Then she told me about her night. Beanie up at ten, then up at one for an hour. When he went back down, she worried that he’d wake up again, and that if she couldn’t fall back to sleep she’d be too tired and would blow her meeting. “Then I’m lying there worrying, trapped in this room, stuck in this bed, trapped like a convict, waiting for a peep from him, and every creak and bird noise and car out there sounds like it’s pretty much happening in my ear, my heart starts pounding and I wonder if I should get up and work, but I know I’ll hate my work and be infected by this insecurity about everything—then Kaya’s standing by my head, shoving a plastic doll in my face, and I’m so happy to see her I want to cry.”

  I waited for her to direct the blame.

  “Does that happen to you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Every night.”

  “How do you stand it?”

  What if it wasn’t my fault?

  “How do you get anything done?”

  “I don’t.”

  “And my face is covered in rosacea, on my chin, under my nose, behind my ears. I have stuff on it that makes it hard to move my skin, and when I do it cracks and burns.”

  What if I was forgivable? What if this was just a phase? What if, in a few months, things improved? What if, underneath it all, she wanted what I wanted? What if, in the meantime, our needs for intimacy were mostly being met by our children? What if we’d been temporarily blown off course and still had a bright future ahead of us, with some acceptable level of insistent sadness woven into the fabric of time?

  After the meeting she went to Iris’s house and talked to the caregivers about hygiene, then sat beside her mother for two hours. “I told her about my meeting. She was really proud. ‘You’
re so smart, so beautiful.’ I think that was the best part of my day. I told her about the new show. ‘My beautiful, beautiful—’ ” Robin was quiet for a second. “ ‘Hey, what’s your name again?’ ” She sighed. I tried to picture it. “I guess that was the worst part of my day.” I told her I was sorry.

  I’d done a lot of horrible things that couldn’t be undone, and planned to write about those things, and was already sorry for that too, for how I was made, sorry for the way I am, that I wanted more, sorry for how badly at that very moment I missed being in bed, in the Barn, listening to the rain, buried deep inside Amy, breathing when she breathed. What did it mean? It meant new life. The first time I felt it, I thought I’d live forever. But I wouldn’t. I was just a body whizzing through time.

  “Dementia,” Robin said, “is connected to estrogen. My dementia will start when menopause starts. But I’m not sure if it’s from not having enough estrogen or from having too much. I can’t remember, which is actually a sign of dementia.”

  “You don’t have dementia.”

  “Promise to kill me when I get like that.”

  I promised, although I knew that what she really wanted was for me to be nice to her, to be kind and patient with everyone, and maybe in a few months our goddamned baby would sleep through the night.

  But I wanted more. I wanted Robin to ask how I’d slept, whether I’d gone to the beach, was I having fun. I wanted some time to show her again who I was, for an hour or two on Sunday mornings, to lie in bed with nowhere to go, feeling cool sheets on my legs, talking about what we’d make for breakfast, listening to the sounds out the window of cars and birds. I wanted hugs and petting and inside jokes, us against the world. I wanted daily eroticism, dishy sex talk, innuendo, full-frontal hugs with her boobs mashed against me as she pinned me against the dishwasher, short bursts of stolen kisses while our shrimps played a room away, a warm body welded to mine, merging for a few seconds before we went our separate ways. I wanted her to put on a show, every night, wanted to feel as though she, or someone, would die from desire; I wanted her to want my body and call me beautiful. I wanted her to say “pussy” every once in a while, “my pussy,” whisper it in my ear, that sort of thing, use the different words for penis now and then, “cock,” “prick.”